Seeing the Wires
‘He said he’d be in by nine,’ said Jack, checking his watch.
‘Is he?’
‘Not unless this is bolloxed. Probably just as well if he doesn’t come in. Lisa doesn’t like him much.’
‘Because he drinks?’
‘Because he’s a journalist. She doesn’t trust them. She says everything you tell them goes in the papers.’
‘I’ve told him lots of things and he hasn’t put any of them in the paper.’
‘You don’t have anything worth printing. Not these days. I think we could have kept him in material when we were young.’
‘I don’t know. Anyway, Lisa’s right. I don’t trust Eddie. Not when he’s drunk.’
‘He’s always fucking drunk.’
‘There you are then.’
I wasn’t sure where I was. The conversation kept heading off somewhere, then turning back before it got there. Jack was on his way to another subject. Perhaps he wanted to talk about Lisa. He usually did. She was his girlfriend. They had met at some sort of convention for body-piercing aficionados. It had been held at Stourbridge town hall. The two of them had noticed each other across a room full of pinned flesh. Chromed instruments curved out of the crowd; by the light of surgical lamps they started to chat, and snapped together like a ring binder. They had met again a day or two later and one thing had led to one more thing. One more thing had gone on for a month, and then Lisa moved in with Jack and Jack decorated several rooms.
It all sounded serious to me. I fell head over heels all the time, but I’d never done any decorating. I watched decorating on the television while I was waiting for a real programme to come on. Decorating happened at a stage of a relationship that I had either missed or never reached. I thought that it would probably be the latter. I could start relationships, but I wasn’t very good at them. It was like starting fights after a few drinks. It made sense at the time, but you ended up with a headache and no money and all of your mates wishing you’d shut up about it.
I hadn’t met Lisa. Jack said she was wonderful, but I wasn’t going to take his word for anything. He was hardly going to say she was an old boiler with a bosom full of rivets. That’s not the sort of thing you say in the first couple of months. If you get through the first six months you can say anything you like. I think. I’ve never got past four.
I must have been picking the wrong girls.
Jack was happy with Lisa. I knew this because he kept telling me so. He told me so more often than I wanted him to, and after he’d had a few more drinks he’d tell me about it non-stop.
He had a few more drinks.
‘She’s lovely,’ he said, ‘she’s a peach. You hear that? She’s a peach.’
‘Round and hairy?’ I asked.
‘None of yours,’ he said, ‘as it happens. None of your business. She’s wonderful. I don’t know what she’s doing with me.’
‘Perhaps she got one of her rings caught in one of yours. What are you going to do? Is there room between the tattoos to fit her name in? Or is it just going to be her initials?’
Jack went several shades darker. ‘That’s you, isn’t it? Always having a go. You’ve never got this far. Know why? Because you’d rather be out there taking the piss. Have you ever been in love?’
‘Yes,’ I said, truthfully. I was forever falling in love. It was easy; like falling off a bike. I was in love right then. I was going steady with a girl, as it happened.
I’ll tell you about her later.
‘Well then,’ he said, ‘well then. This is real. Lisa is different. This is different.’
‘They’re all different. You said that Jo Branigan and Andrea Horton were different. You thought both of them were different at the same time, for a week. Then you decided they were actually the same.’
‘Lisa is different differently.’
He looked at me helplessly, drunk and infatuated.
‘It’s the same,’ I said, not knowing why I was pushing him. It was instinctive. It was easier than falling off a bike.
‘This is different,’ he insisted.
‘Oh yes, you work in a printers so naturally you know more about anything than I do, I’m just the one who went to university.’
‘What do you know about? Books. You wouldn’t know the real world if it smacked you in the face.’
‘If I smacked you in the face you’d know about it.’
I wasn’t sure how the conversation had turned nasty. Beer, probably.
‘How about if you murdered me?’ asked Jack, leaning into the conversation. ‘You’re the history man. You know why? Because you don’t want to remember your own history. You want to go back before that. You want other people’s memories. I remember everything.’ He rolled back his sleeve; swirls and spirals ran up his arm, between swellings and scabs. ‘Look at this,’ he said, ‘I’m receptive. You with me? I’m receptive.’
‘Receptive to hepatitis B, septicaemia, traffic reports …’
That calmed him down. ‘Have it your way then,’ he said. ‘How’s the niece?’
‘Haven’t seen her since I went to university.’
‘Typical student. How old is she now then? Three, four?’
‘Four.’
‘You know she’s never met her Uncle Jack?’
I did know that. I liked it that way.
‘I’ll tell you what, I’m not doing anything Saturday. We’ll pop round and see her. And your brother, we don’t see him much now.’
‘We fell out. Family things.’
‘Oh yes. Right. So I’ll pick you up about eleven then, and we’ll go and see what they’re up to these days.’
Wonderful, I thought. That’d be a smashing day out.
II
The next day I waited for my hangover to leave and Jack to arrive. My money was on Jack getting there first. Eddie Finch had turned up eventually, and he was better at drinking than I was. Reporters are like that because they don’t have to get up and go to work in the mornings. Although I knew I couldn’t out-drink him, it had seemed important to keep up. It was my competitive edge.
I fed the hangover coffee and Nurofen until it calmed down. Jack turned up late, driving his van. He’d had it for years, since we were seventeen. It had been his first car. It looked like it might have been his grandfather’s first car. The last time I’d seen it, it had been blue. He’d sprayed it white.
‘A white van gives you the freedom of the road,’ he explained on the way to my brother’s house. ‘People see a white van, they know it’s going to go all over the shop. White vans have their own rules. Cut people up, park on lawns, run over dogs and children. It’s accepted … What the fuck is she doing?’
‘The speed limit?’
‘Not in this baby, baby,’ he said in what he thought was an American accent.
‘Hasn’t your sister got a baby?’
‘Little boy,’ Jack admitted. ‘Called it Liam.’
‘Nice,’ I said.
‘No it fucking isn’t. Hold on, I can skirt round this lot.’
After a short and frightening trip, he pulled up on the pavement outside my brother’s house. My brother is older than me, and married, and has a child. For those and other reasons he thinks he’s more grown up than I am. He may be right. I never fancied growing up. There didn’t seem to be an alternative, though, unless you killed yourself young.
The last time I’d seen my brother we’d argued. It’s what brothers are for. When we were young we used to quarrel over anything – what colour the curtains were, how high the sky was, anything at all. Ten minutes later it’d be forgotten. We always got over them.
Jack rang the doorbell. I looked at the front garden. Tidy, with children’s toys. A plastic tractor, a deflated ball, a duck on a stick. A wooden one. The door opened and Tony, my brother, stood looking at us, confused.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘Visiting,’ said Jack. ‘Thought I hadn’t seen you for a while. Nor your Caroline. She in, then? And I’ve never even met the sprog. What is she now, two?’
‘Going on five,’ said Tony, giving me a grim look. Perhaps he hadn’t got over our last argument after all. Caroline appeared behind him, carrying a tea towel and a small child endowed with her mother’s blonde hair and her father’s brown eyes.
‘Whassit?’ asked the child, giving us a look. She didn’t seem shy. She looked at Jack.
‘Whassit in his face? Why’s pins in it?’ She reached out a small hand. Jack leaned closer.
‘All right there kiddo,’ he said. ‘I’m your uncle Jack, and this is your uncle Sam, but we won’t worry about him.’
‘Jack!’ cried the child.
‘Sam,’ said her mother, with considerably less enthusiasm. ‘Been a while. Didn’t get your letters. Suppose the post office must have lost them.’
‘Too busy with keeping out of the way,’ said Tony. His expression was easing. ‘Come in then, the house prices’ll drop if you stay outside. Is that your van?’
‘Mine,’ admitted Jack.
‘Good. It’ll piss them right off. They’re all scutters down the road.’
He led us to a small, comfortable lounge. There were fewer chairs than people. To make room Jack sat on the floor, wincing on the way down. At once the little girl toddled over to him and poked at him with a podgy finger.
‘Look!’ she said, tugging at one of his facial rings.
‘Is she okay doing that?’ asked Caroline.
‘Sure,’ said Jack, ‘she could do it for England. Here hold on, trouble, let’s pop one out and you can have a look at it. What’s this one’s name, then?’
‘Samantha,’ her mother said.
‘Named her after your brother-in-law? Lovely gesture.’
‘You must be joking,’ said Tony, brightening. ‘Fine start in life that’d be, named after the ugly one in the family. Named her after someone I used to know, as a matter of fact.’
Caroline gave him a hard little look, which he pretended not to see. The house smelt like a laundry, I noticed. There were drying clothes on all the radiators. Jack unsnapped an eyebrow ring and gave it to Samantha who examined it intensely.
‘Jack!’ she exclaimed, handing it back to him. ‘Another!’
‘I haven’t got that many I can do in polite company, sweetheart,’ he told her. I always felt awkward around children, as though they might vomit on me or ask me something appalling. Jack seemed suited to it. I suppose he was colourful.
Tony disappeared into the kitchen and returned with tea in sad mugs. Mine had faded Muppets on it. I took a sip. It tasted strange. I thought about the pranks on the building sites. Some of those had involved tea with added ingredients.
‘Milk powder,’ explained Caroline. ‘The little monster gets all the real milk.’
‘Not a monster!’ explained Samantha. ‘Jack’s got fings in his face.’
‘Things,’ Tony corrected her. ‘Not fings. And we don’t talk about people.’
‘Do,’ said Samantha. ‘Do too.’ She looked at Jack. ‘Mummy and Daddy talk about Sam,’ she said. ‘Not me. A bad one. Is she here?’
‘I think she might be,’ Jack said, looking at me. I could see him storing that one up for later use.
‘Here, I’ll put the television on,’ said Tony. ‘We like the television, don’t we?’
‘Jack!’ said Samantha, and then forgot she was standing and fell over. ‘Bump,’ she said, ‘ouch.’
Tony and Caroline exchanged a look. It was the sort of look you only get to exchange once you’re a parent. I like children, although I don’t think they fit in with my lifestyle. Being single makes having children difficult, especially for men. Caroline hoisted Samantha up and aimed her at Jack, and Tony ferreted the remote control from under a cushion and turned on the television. It crackled.
‘Growly,’ explained Samantha. ‘Jack? Whassit in the nose?’
Jack began to reach to his face, before being distracted by the television. I looked to see what had caught his interest. It looked like Dudley Castle.
‘Dudley Castle,’ the narrative informed us, ‘has not survived intact.’
‘What’s this?’ asked Tony. ‘Can’t be Time Team, that’s Sundays. And I can’t see anyone in a woolly jumper.’
‘They have a lot of woolly jumpers,’ said Caroline.
‘Only one each,’ said Tony. ‘Woolly jumpers and a small piece of pottery that they find every week because they take it with them. What’s this?’
‘Views of Dudley,’ said Jack, scanning the TV guide. ‘A documentary. Five sites of interest in Dudley.’
‘Five?’ asked Tony.
‘Well, it doesn’t specify who’d be interested,’ I said. ‘If it’s sites of interest to traffic light fans they could do it.’
‘Charity shops,’ suggested Jack. Samantha was still looking at him, entranced. I felt a pang of jealousy. She was my niece. Jack had a nephew of his own, and I didn’t see why my niece had to like him. I wasn’t even sure why I did.
The view on the television changed, passing from the view of the town to what looked like a dull row of houses.
‘And this is of interest, is it?’ asked Tony. Caroline shrugged.
‘Turn it over,’ said Samantha. ‘Tweenies.’
‘Hold on,’ said Jack, paying more attention to the screen than it seemed to merit. ‘Just a minute there, I want to watch this.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s interesting, you know? This is where we live.’ He tuned the rest of us out. Samantha whiled away the time by pulling at his piercings. The documentary spent a while dawdling around the row of dull houses, and then took in some other equally dull views, the old railway tracks down by Dudley Port, a set of new houses on the Russells Hall Estate, a grubby factory on Pear Tree Lane, the collapsed priory that lay in pieces behind the college. One or two other houses featured, but they could have been anywhere. Jack sat entranced.
‘Boring,’ said Samantha. ‘Boring on the telly. Tweenies. Tweenies.’ For the last word she used a register only available to small children and military experiments into sonic weapons, a sharp squeal that punctured your head like a frozen skewer.
‘Sorry, kiddo,’ said Jack, ‘I’ve been hogging the box.’ He turned over and we tuned in to the Tweenies, and very bright they were. Jack didn’t seem to be watching it, though. I was watching him. Tony was watching me, and so was Caroline. They were both watching me but in different ways and I didn’t want to catch their eyes. Jack was looking at the set, and absently fending off Samantha, but he wasn’t really with us. He’d gone into himself, I thought. In fact he’d gone much, much further.
Before long, we’d all be going there with him.
Chapter Three
I
I’ve had more girlfriends than you might think likely. But they don’t stick around for long. They’re like summer colds: they turn up, send you light-headed for a couple of days, then two weeks of headaches and it’s all over. There have been quite a few of them and all but one of them have gone their own ways. There have been several, but in terms of time spent together they don’t add up to a single long-term relationship. That’s total time together. I’m not adjusting for moods and tantrums.
I don’t want to sound ungrateful here. It could be worse. Some people are surprised I’ve had a girlfriend at all, let alone one you could take outdoors in daylight. And they’ve been convenient. They haven’t overlapped. I’ve had friends with overlapping girlfriends and it always ends up with shouting. There are reprisals and cars have to be resprayed. It’s all too much trouble. I’ve stuck with girlfriends who don’t overlap, but they haven’t stuck with me.
I was in town getting a new bus pass, thinking about girlfriends. It was summer in Dudley: the time of year when the sky goes a brighter shade of grey. There seemed to be more young people than the year before, but there always seemed to be more young people than the year before. It was me, getting older. It couldn’t be many more years before I’d go out in the middle of summer in thirty cardigans and a flock of coats. I watched pretty girls teetering on the edge of adulthood, poised on the brink of stretchmarks and hoovering.
The travel centre is next to the bus stop, and it’s got a queue in it. The queue has been there since the travel centre opened, and it hasn’t got any shorter. The travel centre was moved to the bus depot five years ago. Before that, people had to queue in the town centre, where the travel centre used to be before it was knocked down so that the council could build some new public toilets by the market before the smell from the old public toilets led to an epidemic.
The queue isn’t there because the people working in the travel centre are slow. They’re not slow, they’re friendly and efficient. I’m biased about this, but take it from me, considering the sort of things they have to deal with they’re bright and lively. There are two young women in very crisp blouses with well-ordered haircuts. Straight fringes. Behind them is a door, and behind that you can see part of an office. An older woman sits in there and sometimes comes out and looks at everyone in the long queue the way you’d look at an unexpected boil on your scrotum. She has hair that’s been forced into a state beyond tidiness. It’s pulled away from her face, not without good reason. For many years I thought that no one knew what she did, but I now have insider information.
The two girls sit on low stools behind small windows in a Perspex screen with fingermarks all over it. There are fingermarks next to the ceiling. Someone must have stood on the counter to do it. In front of one window is an old woman trying to get a bus to a village that fell into the sea sixty years ago. In about half an hour, she’ll try to pay with a money-off voucher for shampoo. In front of the other window is a woman trying to buy a student pass for her son, who isn’t with her. She’ll be going through all the possible variants.
‘Well, he could go to Birmingham by bus, then get the train to Cardiff, and then get the local line to his digs. How can we do that?’
It turns out that we can do that by filling in eighteen ninety-page documents, while everyone else waits and the old woman by the other window gets older. After filling out the documents and handing them over, it turns out that the woman can’t have any passes or tickets because her son has to sign everything, twice. Besides, he might be better off with a super saver plus for part of his journey but he’ll need to go to Cardiff to see about that.
The old woman remembers the name of the village she wants to go to, and it isn’t the one she’d been talking about after all. That was something she saw on television.
The mother decides to leave it, she’ll pop back later and bring her son along. He’ll need a passport photograph, but he won’t be able to get one at the travel centre because the photo booth is broken. There are two obnoxious children in it, surreptitiously pinching one another under the sign asking parents not to let their children play in the photo booth. No one claims the children. Everyone ignores them, secretly hoping that they’ll do themselves some severe harm.
The mother’s place at the window is taken by another woman with a son who also needs a student pass or a free ticket to somewhere. This time the student is with her, looking bored and mumbling. The old woman gets her return ticket to Barmouth, which hasn’t fallen into the sea and is where she wanted to go all along, and discovers that she has to pay for it. This hadn’t occurred to her. She’s about a hundred and fifty but she hasn’t got the hang of shops. She produces a purse and begins taking very small coins from it, one by one. Her ticket will cost her eighteen pounds something, and she’s prepared to count small change until she gets there.
The son won’t tell the girl behind the counter where he wants to go. He mumbles embarrassedly. He can see the bright white shape of the girl’s bra through her crisp white blouse. He tries to look away, but it’s difficult. He is hunched over the form because he has an erection. He’s seventeen and his mother is with him. He puts together a series of unlikely fantasies involving himself and the two girls and many of the other people in the travel centre, including the old woman with the endless supply of sixpences and, of course, his own mother.
Everyone else has the right money, and they have it ready, and they know what they want. One of the two children in the photo booth swears meaninglessly. No one pays any attention.
I know all about the travel centre, because I get my bus pass from it. Once a month my bus pass needs renewing and the travel centre is where I have to go to renew it. I stand in the queue and, in the fullness of time, I get to the front and get another month’s travel on the randomly driven and unevenly scheduled buses.
For months I noticed one of the girls serving there. She was attractive, I thought. I noticed her eyes. I also noticed that she was at the other window, whichever window I got to. As I only went there once a month the chances of getting to her window were low. At twenty-eight day intervals I would look sideways at her while someone else sorted out my bus pass. She had a name badge on, but I couldn’t read it at that angle. Once, while I was trying to make out her name I caught the girl who was serving me eyeing me the way you’d eye a cockroach in the butter dish. From her point of view, I was glancing sidelong at her colleague’s chest. I looked at her chest instead but it didn’t cheer her up.
I began to consider getting a different type of bus pass, so that I could go in at fortnightly intervals.
I don’t know what it was that I found attractive about her. I find strange things attractive. This has been a bonus, considering some of the things I’ve been through. She had neat hair and tidy features. She had angular cheekbones and a straight nose. It looked as though someone had gone over her face with a geometry set, sorting it all out and getting it symmetrical. She had dark eyes. I couldn’t say what colour they were because I was always off to one side of her and never less than three yards away. I wanted to know. She was thin, and I liked that. She had wrists like a sparrow’s ankles. She didn’t have any rings on her fingers. This was good on two counts. Firstly, it meant that she wasn’t married or engaged. Or that she was, but she was embarrassed about it. Secondly, it might mean that she didn’t like jewellery, which was a good thing. I couldn’t afford to buy jewellery.
I was planning birthday presents for a girl I had never spoken to. Things were getting serious before they’d had a chance to be frivolous. The next month I arrived at the front of the queue and found that I was yet again at the wrong window. I went to the back of the queue again. I had a feeling that I needed to move the relationship forward. Speaking to her, for example. When I got to the front of the queue, I thought, I’d ask her out.
I waited for what felt a ridiculously long time, moving forward in slow shuffles, hoping she wouldn’t go to lunch or die of old age before I reached her. Over the dandruff-strewn shoulders of grubby Midlanders I watched her dark eyes. She called the main office to ask about timetables. She advised people where to get off. She gave bank cards to the third woman, who came out of her small office blinking and sullen to check them. A person away from her, one transaction away, I lost my nerve and went home.
I had to find change for a month’s worth of bus travel. I got most of it from down the back of my sofa.
A month later I went through the same procedure, but this time I kept my nerve and asked her out.
Her name was Judy, which wasn’t surprising. She said she’d go out with me, which was. Her eyes were a very dark blue. If they’d been a shade of paint, they’d have been called something like Midnight Shades. Her fringe was so straight it looked like it’d cut you if you touched it. She either had a local accent or a cold. I was so stunned when she said that she’d go out with me that I forgot to get my bus pass.
I had to find change for a month’s worth of bus travel. There was nothing left down the back of the sofa. I had to buy things that only cost four pence so that I’d have the ninety-six pence fare in change. Even in Dudley there isn’t much that only costs four pence. Some of the buildings, perhaps, or the freedom of the city.