Hemispheres E-Book

Stephen Baker

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Seitenzahl: 515

Beschreibung

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2011 EAST MIDLANDS BOOK AWARD Moving from the gas-flares of Teesside, to marine adventures in the South Atlantic, Hemispheres is a salutary and searing debut novel for anyone who enjoyed Kes and The Northern Clemency. When sixteen-year-old Danny's father, Yan, leaves their Teesside home to fight in the Falklands War, he never returns and Danny imagines he is either dead or has abandoned him and his mother for good. So when, thirty years later, Yan reappears, there is much to be explained, and forgiven, if father and son are to reconcile their broken relationship. Yan has spent the lost years half a world away, adrift on a remarkable chain of adventures set in motion when he deserted from the army. But when he discovers he is dying from lung cancer, he returns to his homeland in the north-east of England to reconcile his damaged relationship with his son. Separated by years and experience, father and son find unexpected solace and harmony together through their shared love of birds and birdwatching. Hemispheres is a gloriously ambitious debut novel about family, destiny, nature and coming home.

Leseprobe

Hemispheres

Stephen Baker was born in Stockton-on-Tees in 1969,and now lives in Derbyshire. This is his first novel.

Copyright

First published in Great Britain in trade paperback in 2010 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

Copyright © Stephen Baker, 2010

The moral right of Stephen Baker to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination and not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

First eBook Edition: January 2010

ISBN: 978-0-857-89054-2

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

Contents

Cover

Hemispheres

Copyright

1. Flightless Steamer Duck: (Tachyeres brachypterus)

2. Red-Throated Diver: (Gavia stellata)

3. Wilson’s Storm Petrel: (Oceanites oceanicus)

4. Snow Bunting: (Plectrophenax nivalis)

5. Wilson’s Phalarope: (Phalaropus tricolor)

6. Wandering Albatross: (Diomedia exulans)

7. Pallas’ Warbler: (Phylloscopus proregulus)

8. Nightjar: (Caprimulgus europaeus)

9. Magellanic Penguin: (Spheniscus magellanicus)

10. Spotted Redshank: (Tringa erythropus)

11. Long-Tailed Tit: (Aegithalos caudatus)

12. Southern Lapwing: (Vanellus chilensis)

13. Long-Toed Stint: (Calidris subminuta)

14. Grey Heron: (Ardea cinerea)

15. Chilean Flamingo: (Phoenicopterus chilensis)

16. Whooper Swan: (Cygnus cygnus)

17. Curlew: (Numenius arquata)

18. Jackdaw: (Corvus monedula)

19. Guillemot: (Uria aalge)

20. Herring Gull: (Larus argentatus)

21. Black Redstart: (Phoenicopterus ochruros)

22. Thrush Nightingale: (Luscinia luscinia)

23. Eider: (Somateria mollissima)

24. Raven: (Corvus corax)

25. Dunlin: (Calidris alpina)

1. Flightless Steamer Duck

(Tachyeres brachypterus)

Only six degrees outside but Dave’s already damper than a glass-blower’s arse. There’s a sheen to his slick face like paraffin, like the sweat that starts from a lump of meat when you put it to the fire. Fidgeting the cards in his hand, left and right, over and under. A cigar ette perched on the scalloped edge of his ashtray, the ash beginning to lengthen and the clotted smoke spiralling upward. Whisky in a stained glass, at least his fifth tonight. A cheap Canadian brand. I can taste the heartburn.

I smell you, says Joe Fish, elongated face and slicked-back hair flickering in the wash from the hurricane lamps, like a snail has run over him. The room is cavernous, a farmhouse kitchen with that sour milk smell of damp. Paraffin light trembles like a moth, skitters away from the corners where sinkholes of dark are welling up. Joe splashes a rumpled note into the centre.

The Falkland Islands, he says. Islas Malvinas. Whatever you call it, it’s still the arse end of the earth. We’re fighting over the scraps here boys.

He rattles his fingernails like a snare drum against the table. It’s a battered thing, cobbled from ancient timbers. Gouged and scorched and pitted and tattooed and rubbed smooth by the passage of elbows and forearms, the buffeting of lives gone elsewhere. But the elbows on the table now are Joe’s, pale twisted things like roots.

I’ll go another twenty bar, he mutters, a second note following the first.

Joe plays distractedly, the game getting tangled up with his internal monologue. He bluffs aggressively, destructively. He sits on his hands. He chases his tail.

Working men. Aye, the great party of workers. We should stick together. Stick together like brothers.

He unscrews the top from a bottle, sniffs, grimaces, and slops a good three fingers into his glass. I take a yeasty gulp of beer. It’s very cold. My eyes are stinging with the smoke.

I’m in man, says Horse Boy, tipping a note in.

He’s almost gone, eyes darting wildly around the room, voice slurred. This is why I stick to beer. It’s cold and calming. It slows everything down, makes everything clear. I’m assembling a cigar ette. A screw of dry tobacco on the paper, curled between the fingers, a deliberate dab of saliva. It’s tiny, not much more than the thickness of a match. Just enough to deliver the required jolt.

Fighting over a rock, in the middle of the drink, rambles Joe. Me against my brother. I’ve no beef with him, not me. I never thought the witch would send us down here. Never in a million years.

No, not me, says Fabián Rodriguez, laying his cards face down. I fold.

He closes his hooded eyes for a moment and fronds of his long hair trickle down either side of his face. Brow ridges, cheekbones, septum.

Look out there, says Joe.

We strain to see out of the window but only our faces splash back at us, foolish lanterns swimming in darkness. Joe leans towards me, shadow congealing in his deep eye sockets.

Nobody knows where the lines are, he says. Our boys and the spics. They’re all out there lost, wandering about in the night.

I shrug.

I’m in lads, I say. And I’ll raise you two hundred.

I reach over for Joe’s lighter, a big brass thing like a shell case, and relish the oily smell of paraffin as I spark up, suck in a lungful. See, you got to have some discipline in this game. That’s what Branigan taught me anyway, them rainy afternoons in the County. Two pair, jacks up, is the minimum hand. Anything less is a fold. It’s foolproof. Play it to the letter and you’ll make at least a modest buck.

You got to have some discipline in this game. Shame I never fucking listened to Branigan.

Dave is sweating like a nun in a cucumber field and I’m sure he’s on the hook. I’ve been bluffing hard and losing on crap cards. He thinks I’m a tool and that’s the way I want it. I’m egg ing it up on a pair of queens here and I’ve started this nervous blinking every time I raise. And I see him notice, his eyebrows twitching and settling again. I see him notch it away for future use. Blink means bluff. He opens and closes the buckle on his watch, worrying at the hairless white flesh of his forearm.

And now everyone is looking at him. The little eyes in the heavy face dart about, searching, appraising. He plays with his watch, a big heavy designer thing, the kind you need a mortgage to buy. His cigarette froths on the edge of the ashtray, the untapped finger of ash growing.

It’s an ugly business, Joe rambles. See, in the old days, it was single combat, right? Champion against champion. Achilles and Hector. Them lads were bred up for war, see? Hard as nails they were.

It was the Bronze Age Joe, I say. They never had nails.

Hard as bronze, then. Not like now. Podgy lads straight from school, with the stink of fear on ’em.

They were still fighting for the man Joe, I say, winking at Fabián. It was his woman.

Joe looks blank.

The Greeks man, I persist. They went to get Helen back. The big man’s trophy wife. Ten years fighting, all because the lady scoffed too much of Paris’ Milk Tray. Now I hear she was a canny splitarse, but in my book a decade of all-out warfare could be seen as over-reaction.

A slender smile creeps across the face of Fabián Rodriguez. Dave picks up his cigarette, taps the ash, takes a big drag.

Okay boys, says Dave. Fuck it, I’ll play.

He’s dicking around with that watch again, over and over. He’s got the cards. Definitely. I wait for him to raise, pressure building in my bladder. But he doesn’t. Tips two hundred in.

See you.

As I expected, Joe has nothing. Bluffing, king high. Dave has little greedy eyes like a penguin and a wobble to his chin. Plenty of penguins on the Falklands – gentoo, macaroni, magellanic, rockhopper.

Chuck the man a sardine.

I lay down my pair of queens with a foolish grin. Beat that David. Dave lays his cards down, one by one. Three kings. Gold, frankincense and myrrh.

It’s a pleasure taking money off you ladies.

He scoops the pot from the table.

Next hand, Yan to deal?

Actually Dave, I’m going to get some air. Jimmy riddle. I’ll sit out a couple.

I stand up, glue the roll-up between my lips and head for the door.

Outside the farmhouse it’s cold, the southern winter thickening. I walk away from the faint light of the windows, down towards the shore, tobacco smoke blooming almost crystalline in the night air. Stop at the bottom of the jetty and piss into the sea, steam rising, the bladder relaxing. Simple pleasures. The darkness is viscous, complete. I breathe it in. No lights at all, only the impossible chaos of stars brushed across the night sky like silver sand. Alpha Centauri blinking. Somewhere a raft of steamer ducks rising and falling on the swell, gabbling and sighing in their sleep. They’re flightless. If you don’t use your wings then they will shrivel up to stumps.

Shoals of islands out there. Keppel and Pebble and Carcass and Sedge. North Fur and South Fur. Elephant Jason, Flat Jason, Grand Jason, Steeple Jason. Long low grey seals lying stretched in the white-furred sea. How long have they been here, losing their wings?

We’ve only been here twenty-three days. I draw hungrily on the nub of my cigarette and it sears into the roach and the smoke turns bitter and mealy.

When I go back into the farmhouse I think of The Dice Players. Georges de La Tour, isn’t it? We saw it at Preston Hall, when you were just a kid.

Aye, I remember.

Really?

Think so. It’s going back a few years, mind.

Entombed underground, almost like a burial chamber. A crypt. It stopped the sunlight fading the colours I suppose. Down a flight of stairs and along a dark corridor and a small room glowing at the end.

That painting. It was like a chunk of time had frozen and never thawed out. It didn’t move on.

Danny, you’ve hit the nail on the head. Five blokes stood around the table. You’re right there in the room with them, in this rich and smoky and port-and-tobacco-scented sixteenth-century darkness. But they aren’t looking at you. Candlelight shivers over your skin like goose-flesh, touches the face of a man sucking at a long clay pipe, touches the open palm of a hand. Candleflames ripple in the tabletop, in that deep mahogany sheen and the dice frozen in movement. You’ve stumbled in, just when everything’s in motion and nothing is settled. These living, breathing men, awake only to the racing dice. Tumbling like the planets, like the spheres of the universe. And soon enough they’ll come to rest. But for now. For now the night is endless and the candle will never burn down and the dice will never rest.

I stop in the doorway for a moment and look at them. Paraffin light washes over their faces. Eyes lidded, turned down over the cards. I lean on the doorframe, breathe in their tobacco second hand. The face of Fabián Rodriguez is framed in the light. He’s about to show. The cards are in motion.

Look, says Joe Fish, who has already folded. They’ll find us in the end. You can’t just walk away in the middle of a war.

I just fancied going for a wander, I say. In them new boots.

Joe cracks a broad tombstone grin and Fabián spreads his cards on the table. A run, six through ten. It’s an intimate business, peeling the boots from a dead man. Puttees and socks underneath, the delicate flexure of the toe bones.

You took a dead man’s boots?

Aye. We all did. Our issue boots were shite and they fell to bits in the field. I started walking, through this strange blue sunlight, bright but bitter cold. Ringing in my head like a Tibetan singing bowl, someone running a moistened finger round the rim of my skull. And snow came, scribbles of it across the russet flanks of the mountain, and my feet rattled down stone runs, tramped through tussocks of whitegrass and pigvine, squelched over cushions of oreob and sphagnum. Scribbles of snow descending across my vision, swarming across the surfaces of my brain. It swallowed the others, blanked out the mountain, and I kept walking. Berkeley Sound down below, the long firth crawling away to the ocean, water bickering in the steady wind. And I walked towards it, towards the sea. When I got there, I would carry on. Icy water mounting to my chin, swallowing me. Walking down onto the deep ocean floor until the pressure burst me.

There’s no shame in it, says Joe Fish. Who’s to know, anyway? The fog of war. If you come back with us now Yan, no fucker will ever know you were missing.

I notice Horse Boy on the floor, asleep. A happy knack. The lamp casts a sheen over his bare back where muscles shiver in the blue autumn night, and his close-cropped head ripples like rabbit fur. Only Dave is left in.

Joe yawns and stretches. We are the proxies, he says. For the real villains. They need mugs like us to fight it out for them because they lack the cojones. We are exploited, man. Pure exploited.

Men like us, I say to him. Coal hewers and crucible pullers and farm navvies. Ripping the guts out of hawthorn hedges in raw November. They think we’re just doing what we’re told. But all along we’re creating ourselves. It’s in our blood to mine our own history in the dark, black and glittering carboniferous lumps of it.

That’s what I’m saying, he persists. We do the dying, and they get the glory.

But none of it matters man. It’s over in the blink of an eye. Steamer ducks spent a hundred million years down here evolving flightlessness.

Metaphysics, says Joe Fish, I’m trying to dig you out of a hole here, and you start in on the metaphysics.

He lights a fag, a straight, and the smoke gurgles upward. When I say it doesn’t matter what I mean is it doesn’t exist. There is no war. Just the five of us, and the cards, and darkness outside.

Dave lays down his cards, one by one. A flush. Five spades like ripe, black fruit. He scoops the pot again, and yawns, like an elephant seal.

Call it a day? Or should I say a night?

He proffers a queasy smile, begins to get up. Must be up hundreds on the last few hands.

The night is without end, says Joe Fish. And sleep is not for men like us.

He grips Dave’s forearm and looks at him steadily from the ruined face. His eye sockets loom enormously, teeth like tombstones.

Play, he says. You deal.

Almost apologetically, Dave sits. Joe releases him. He deals. Five beatific faces in the lamplight, one cloaked in sleep, four hooded over the cards.

I have two jacks and some fluff, but Fabián Rodriguez is pushing things before the draw.

Two thousand, he says, his eyes black.

We take this on board silently. Dave has lit another cigarette and like its predecessor it clings to the notch of the ashtray, smoke blooming upwards. The beer is bitter and citrus and clear. Joe Fish beaches his cards with a grunt of disgust.

Fabián has something up his sleeve, I say, pushing notes into the middle.

His eyes remain black, unreadable, a dancing mote of lamplight in the pupil.

This is more like it boys, says Dave. Proper wedge.

He too shuffles some paper into the pot. His hands go under the table. I can’t see the watch, can’t read him at all.

Dance for tha’ daddy, sing for tha’ mammy, croons Joe, leaning back, scrolls of smoke issuing from mouth and nostrils.

One card, says Fabián, jerking his head like a horse as the card slides across to him.

One card. The probabilities churn inside my head. If he’s holding two pair and drawing to a full house it’s one in six and a half. If he’s drawing one card to a flush it’s one in four.

I’ll take three, I say. Makes it obvious I’m holding a pair or nothing, but it can’t be helped. Empty my head and let the cards come to me, sliding across the table. Stretch out this moment of not knowing. Of not being.

No cards, says Dave. Smugly.

His dimpled hands come out from under the table, fluttering like flames. He unscrews the cap from the whisky bottle. Pours himself a generous measure, trying not to spill. He must be holding full house or better. Unless he’s bluffing. The hands go back under the table. I look at him and blink three times and he sees it. His cigarette in the ashtray, untouched, the ash tongue beginning to grow.

Dance for tha’ daddy, for tha’ mammy sing. Joe drums on the table-top with those clubbed fingertips, the nails ridged and stripped back.

I raise. Five thousand, says Fabián. His pupils are becoming more dilated, tunnels into the centre of his head.

Thou shalt have a fishy, on a little dishy.

I will smell you Fabián, I say. This is the last of my cash, though the others don’t know it. I can’t raise any further. Blink. Blink.

See your five, and raise another five, says Dave. He’s bluffing. Must be. Three or four solid hands in a row and it can’t go on for ever. Probabilities. Hands under the table. Tobacco being slowly consumed, the untapped ash halfway to the filter.

Fabián is unblinking. Very well, I match your five.

They look at me.

Joe, I say. He holds my gaze. Joe.

Throw for it, he says, and slaps a hand onto the table, flat, with his palm upwards. He looks at my hand, with the forefinger and middle finger extended. The paraffin lamp picks out his palm, my fingers, the sheen on our faces.

Scissors cut paper, I say.

Joe reaches somewhere deep into his kit bag, and pulls out a metal cylinder, a thermos flask. He unscrews the lid and delves inside, withdraws a fat roll of notes.

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 thread-bare 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 and 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?

Youth Training Scheme, isn’t it? I tried to focus on an old works calendar. A woman’s body with a tyre tread rolling down her spine, between her buttocks.

Your Tough Shit, that’s what it stands for. Twenty-six fucking quid a week, I ask you.

I made what I hoped was a noise of agreement.

Look at yourself Danny. Your dad’s gone for good. Yer mam – she wants to move on. She wants a new dick. You got to look after number one. Empty the fucking till and get your own gaff. Forget about school and exams. Exams is just pieces of paper. Here, look.

He picked up a stray sheet of paperwork from the floor, brandished it at me, then turned his back and peeled down the skin-tight jeans to expose a pair of rosy buttocks. He balled the paper in one hand and ostentatiously wiped his arse with it, dragging it down his crack from front to back, then pinging it against the wall.

That’s what you do with fucking exams, he grinned as he hauled up his jeans, eyes bulging. Learn how to party son, because you’re only young once. You don’t want to look back and ask yourself where it all went.

He was silhouetted starkly in the doorway, braced against either side. Behind him a flock of lapwings rose like smoke from the flooded pools of Haverton Hole, the piping call taken up by every bird, echoing over the marsh. They blew over on rain-softened wings. People were full of advice these days, full of certainty. I was too mashed to come up with any answers. In the end Paul lurched off in search of more entertainment. I could hear his boots receding across the cinder yard. I could hear Yan’s boots coming up the stairs of the pub. Rise and shine me hearties. No rest for the wicked. Have you ever seen a paddyfield warbler? The scratch of the fingers rubbing the stubble on his chin.

The sound of him coming up the stairs, the clatter of his feet filling the stairwell, swelling out into the world.

*

I woke up, mouth burning with acid, with rust and chemicals. It was dark, and I was in the tiny box room at the back of the pub. I couldn’t remember finding my way back from the portakabin. Noise bursting from downstairs, loud inflamed voices. I looked at the red, blinking eye of the clock radio. Half past nine. Nausea rumbled through me like a distant train.

Jonah. Nine-ish, he’d said.

I stumbled out onto the dark landing. Squalls of noise from the bar downstairs. On the stairs in the dark, hand on a wooden banister smoothed by countless other hands. Kate thought the pub was haunted. Like someone watching me, she said. And when I turn round, there’s nobody. Yan laughed at her. I’ll take any customer, living or dead, as long as they pay for their ale. You can only have a tab if you’ve got a fucking pulse.

Ghosts, I thought, that day on the stairs. Every pub must have ghosts. All the feet that have traipsed through it, all the lives that have been threaded through it. And Yan, too. Perhaps he’s one of them now.

They were crowded round the pool tables. Watching, jostling, thumbs in waistbands, smoke billowing up from cigarettes clamped between lips and wedged into ashtrays. Gary Hagan himself was behind the bar, back to me, laughing at some harsh banter. A stark shaft of light roared down onto the green baize, solidified the dribbles of fagsmoke like candlewax poured into cold water. The rest of the bar was dark.

Fuck off, bellowed Jonah. You’re underage.

He punched me on the arm and burst into ringing laughter, face creasing like a leather glove. Michelle served us, beer slopping into the pint glasses like whipped cream. Dark rodent eyes kept flipping dumbly up to mine as she waited for them to fill. You shouldn’t be here, they said. She swiped the crumpled greenies from Jonah’s fingers and turned away.

We found a table and sat down. Jonah raised his pint.

Here’s to your old man, then.

He sipped thoughtfully, brow knitting.

Where’s Kate?

Upstairs. Go up and have a word, if you like.

Still on the smiley pills?

Aye. She’s camped in front of the telly most of the time. Like a kid gawping at the fishtank in the dentist’s waiting room.

He frowned and lifted his glass, swirled the brown liquid round and round.

Keep expecting him to walk back through that door, he said. He had plans for this place, once he was out of the army.

Funny, that. He was always slagging the area off.

That’s the paradox, said Jonah. When you’re here, you want out. But when you’re on the other side of the world you get this ache. It’s like migration. You don’t understand why but you have to do it.

He sipped his beer.

Your dad certainly did the rounds, he said. Germany, Belize, Norn Iron.

There was an old gadge at the bar, waiting to get served. Decko – the one who lived with his pigeons. Michelle kept cutting him a glance and then serving someone else. Magoo hauled himself over from the pool table, shiny-faced with the beergut thrust in front of him.

Do you know who this fucking is? he yelled at Michelle across the bar. He clapped a meaty paw on the old feller’s shoulder, gold rings clustered on the swollen fingers. Light flickered though his sparse blonde hair as he turned to address the bar.

This ladies and gentlemen, he roared, face an ugly mask under the hard overhead light. This is the hardest man on Teesside. This is the bareknuckle champion of County Durham, Mr Declan Leary.

Decko glanced round, embarrassed. Thick white hair Brylcreemed back and stained yellow, dandruff on the shoulders of the shabby suit. You hardly ever heard him talk, except to his birds.

Took on allcomers, this gadge, announced Magoo. Nineteen forties, nineteen fifties. Me old man told me the stories.

He set his jaw forward like a bulldog and let an explosive belch go. Kurt sidled over to the bar, big blue eyes, cheekbones and a psycho-billy quiff. Him and Magoo bookending the old man, towering over him.

Now mate, he said to Decko. Never knew you were a fucking brawler.

Not just a fucking brawler, roared Magoo. He was the fucking best. In the upstairs rooms and the backlots. Put any cunt on his back for half a crown, eh? Every gold-toothed pikey bastard, every plastic hardman in Boro.

Kurt grinned, turned and scanned the bar, one of his unearthly blue eyes squinting off to one side.

D’y’ever kill a man Decko?

Decko shook his head.

Aye he did, yelled Magoo. Some gadge who swallowed his own tongue. Me dad said he was on his back with foam coming out of his gob, eh? But his feet kept tapdancing for a full twenty minutes. Twenty fucking minutes.

Decko shook his head again.

Ow Michelle, said Kurt. Get the man a pint in, eh? On the house, like.

She turned and looked at Decko.

Mild, he said.

Jonah swirled his glass round.

You were born with a caul Danny, he said. You know what that is?

Aye.

It’s the sac you’re inside. In the womb. Keeps you from drowning in there. Most times it breaks up during the birth, but you were born with it right over your head. They had to strip it off so you could start breathing.

Aye, I know.

Jonah dropped his voice.

I kept it, he said. Asked Kate if I could. I’ve still got it.

Why?

Michelle plonked the pint down in front of Decko but Kurt lifted it up from the bartowel and had a good gulp.

Away then champ, he said, tapping his chin. Let’s fucking go. Let’s fucking ’ave you.

He started to bob and weave and throw imaginary punches. Magoo roared with laughter.

It’s a powerful talisman, that’s why, said Jonah. Against drowning.

I snorted.

Been a merchant navy cook twenty year, Jonah went on. Hard as nails, been called all the names under the sun for the state of my food. But what fucking terrifies me Dan, is going down with a ship.

I watched the creases dance around his eyes, the way his nose bobbed up and down when he was animated. He reached across the table and gripped my forearm. I looked into his eyes, steady and brown.

It keeps the terror down, he said. Just having it tucked away, stowed in my kitbag. I know it’s just a barmy old superstition.

But.

Aye. But.

He laughed.

Franco leaned back against the bar with his cue. He had these deep hungry eyes like wormholes, sunken cheeks you could measure between thumb and forefinger.

Makes you think, he said. The old hardmen, they’re all coffin dodgers now.

Magoo leaned back next to him, tee-shirt riding up his kite.

Back then like, said Franco. It was all white, eh? None of your monkey men over here. Coons.

He was looking at Jonah.

*

Did you ever try to find out what really happened to your dad?

His voice was low and urgent.

I shrugged. The army just told us the bare bones, I said, flatly. He was in action at Mount Longdon, not long before the surrender. It was a mess, close quarters and that. Afterwards, well, he’d just gone. Never seen again. No body, no nothing.

Spoken to anyone who was actually there?

Jonah’s eyes were focused on me, large and dark like an owl’s.

Nah. I never tried. Look, if he was alive, he’d have been in touch, wouldn’t he?

Jonah studied me. I used to have a map of the Falklands up on my bedroom wall, when the war was on. All them little islands round the coast, Keppel and Pebble and Carcass and Sedge. North Fur and South Fur. Elephant Jason, Flat Jason, Grand Jason, Steeple Jason. I looked at that map every day, those long weeks while they were crawling south, wondering where Yan would be, which of those names would become real places. And then some of them did. And then I took the map down and folded it up and put it in the bin.

It was a premature ejaculation, that war, Jonah smiled. Too much foreplay and not enough action. The sabre-rattling from Maggie after the Argies invaded, the Task Force crawling down the Atlantic. Weeks and weeks of it. But when they landed it was over in a flash. Wham bam thank you ma’am and we’re lying back on the pillows lighting a bifter.

Any bananas back there Michelle? Kurt’s voice sailed over from the bar. We got a monkey sat over here.

The problem with wogs, said Franco, conversationally, is when they start interbreeding with white women.

Ignore him, said Jonah. I’ve had worse from toddlers. The thing is Dan, you need to know. One way or another. You remind me of Schrödinger’s cat.

Who?

Ah. It’s a scientific parable man. Supposed to describe how particles behave. How different possibilities can exist at the same time.

I looked blank.

There’s a professor, right? And he locks his cat in a box.

Poor pussy.

Jonah grinned, but pressed on. Now this is the clever bit. In the box there’s a vial of some radioactive shit. And there’s a fifty-fifty chance that an atom of this stuff decays over the next twenty-four hours. If that happens, it sets off a chemical reaction, produces a poisonous gas, and the cat snuffs it. But if that atom doesn’t decay, the cat lives. Confused, hungry, and mighty pissed off, but alive.

There were monkey noises at the bar, but I tuned them out, focusing in on Jonah. His quiet, insistent voice.

Nobody can predict the outcome, he was saying. Nobody knows what’s happened until they open the box twenty-four hours later, and when they open the box there’s got to be an outcome. The cat is a hundred per cent alive or a hundred per cent dead. But before they open the box, before they know the outcome, the cat is flickering in between. Like a strobe light. Alive. Dead. Alive. Dead. Alive.

I don’t get it.

You got to open the box to make it stick. Until then all the possibilities are floating about, shifting, like ghosts. Ghosts of probability.

He looked pleased with himself.

See, he said. You and Yan are the ghosts. Half alive and half dead, and the box is still shut. You know what you got to do Danny.

Let me tell you a joke, said Franco, pushing back a chair and sitting down at the table. They were standing around us now. Kurt picked up Jonah’s pint glass, cleared his throat, spat in it, put it back down on the table. Phlegm wobbled like eggwhite on the surface of the beer. Jonah leaned back, put his hands behind his head.

What, said Franco, is white, and floats face down in the river?

He put his forearms on the table, sinews bunching and knotting under the bluestained skin. Jonah shrugged.

A nigger, said Franco. With all the shit kicked out of it.

Jonah smiled, thin-lipped, and the lads around the table erupted in laughter. Hagan just kept watching from behind the bar. He was a steroid case, pumped solid from the weights. Had these pudgy features that were goodlooking in a bulky way, a floppy blond wedge cut and a single gold hoop in his ear. He stood there, surrounded by glass. Glass mirrors on the wall, pint glasses nesting on the shelves like seabirds, glinting.

Didn’t know you were a rent boy Danny, he said. You should have told me times were hard. I could have lent you some of your dad’s money out of the till. Or maybes you just like taking it up the wrong’un.

He looked at Jonah. You should know better, grandad. He’s underage for a start.

Jonah blinked.

I better be going Dan, he said, standing up and pushing his chair under the table. He turned to Hagan and raised his glass, studied the thick swirl of phlegm.

Not a bad pint pal. I’ve had worse. A lot worse.

He lifted it to his gob and necked it down in one, phlegm and all. Banged the empty glass down on the table and turned for the door.

Lads, said Hagan.

Magoo went for Jonah, face twisted like a hound dog reaching the end of its chain. Jonah stepped back and sent a stool flying and we watched it bounce across the tiled floor and stop.

And everything stopped, because Kate was stood in the doorway and Trajan was braced against her calves with a snarl stuck in his gullet. She was still beautiful, black hair flowing down her back like a Persian princess. But there was something taut about her these days, skin stretched too tight over the bones.

What’s going on, Gaz?

She looked at Jonah.

What are you doing here?

Jonah grinned and raised his palms. Hagan’s face flowered into an idiot smile.

There’s glass on the floor, she said.

Hagan dived beneath the bar for dustpan and brush. Jonah had gone, left the door gently vibrating behind him. I pushed out into the street where the rain had stopped and there he was, leaning against the pole of the traffic lights, hands thrust into his pockets. I let a taxi glide past and jogged across to him.

Have we got any more business? he said. Red light flushed across his face from above, gave him the bulbous glow of a Halloween apple. I kicked the kerb, hard.

I don’t know what to do.

Yeah you do.

How do I start?

Find out who was there with him. There must be some of them who came back. His mates.

But how can I trace them?

Did he have a diary or owt? Somewhere he wrote down names and numbers and that?

Aye. Come to think of it he did have this old address book.

Do you reckon it’s still lying around somewhere? Back of a drawer, up in the attic?

Dunno. It might be.

There you go then.

Jonah beamed. Above him the lights changed and green light flooded across his face. Molten sunlight dripping through new leaves, transforming him into a mischievous satyr.

Upstairs in the box room and you don’t need to switch on the light because the orange gloaming of Teesside and the gas flares on Billingham are beaming back off the cloudbase and the hangover kicking in behind your eyeballs. Yan clumping up the stairs in them steelcapped boots and the little click at each step from the tendon in his ankle. Yan dead on the Falklands, white shinbones in the peat. Ghosts of probability. Alive. Dead. Alive. Dead. Alive.

Put your hand down on the bedspread with the bitten-down nails and tell yourself it’s real and solid.

3. Wilson’s Storm Petrel

(Oceanites oceanicus)

I put my hand down on the wheel and look at the white flesh and bitten-down nails just to convince myself I’m real and solid. The wheelhouse door is swinging on its hinges, yawning open at the top of a crest and slamming shut in the guts of the following trough. And the weather gets worse, wind, spray and rain streaming across the open deck and bursting against the glass.

Can’t make headway, yells Fabián Rodriguez. The weather full in our face. He moves the dials of the radio and the static howls and pops. Horse Boy curled on the floor in the foetal position with that coverless paperback up close to his coupon. Lips moving soundlessly.

South Georgia, says Joe Fish, hunkered down over the charts, his pocked face glowering from wet oilskins. We can sit it out there, in the lee of the island. Head back west when the weather clears.

Fuck me, a sentence without profanity, I mock. Aren’t there Marines down there?

The imminence of death smartens up the tongue, he counters. They’re at Grytviken only, I think. And it’s a big island – a hundred miles long.

South Georgia, I say, shaking my head. What do you reckon Joe? Reckon there’s another reality where I lost that hand, and right now the redcaps are getting started on me?

Pure shite, he says.

But chance is the breath of the universe marra. It’s what keeps us sharp, eh?

No such thing as chance, he says. If you wound the world right back to the beginning and set it all off again, them cards would still come out the same. Every time.

I give him a slap round the chops, nice and gentle like.

That slap was predestined, I tell him. Nowt I could do about it.

Dave smells of sick, slumped on the bench seat with his mouth gaping. Wishing he never came along, I daresay.

Hang on, so who’s Dave? He was a civvy, right?

Aye, he certainly wasn’t a fucking para with that kite on him. Nah, he was hiding out at Berkeley when the rest of us pitched up.

Fabián as well?

Yep. The deserter from the other crew. Like a mirror image of me. Got on like a house on fire. Dave was in some sort of bother, I reckon, cos he was a right snidey customer.

But the boat was his?

Not after he lost it at cards, it wasn’t. It was a decent bit of kit, mind. Four square sturdy metal tub, an ocean-going trawler with all the fishing gear ripped out. Dave reckoned he used it to run cheap snout and brandy over from South America into the Falklands. Kind of latter-day smuggler.

Sounds like bullshit to me, Yan.

Aye, maybe it was. But that old fish hold was still brimming with the sweet earthy scent of tobacco. Makes me want to spin a bifter up right now.

You can’t. Not in here.

I know.

See, the idea was to just run south around Cape Horn and make land-fall in Chile. Somewhere on that long coast north of Punta Arenas. But we reckoned without the weather, and now it’s driving us south and east into the Southern Ocean. I begin to conjure up a cigarette between my cold fingers and the door rips open again with a splash of Antarctic air.

Vamos! yells Fabián Rodriguez. A squeal of static, a splurge of Spanish, and a soft rock tune starts among the spits of white noise. Not my taste, says Fabián, but it’s the best I can give you.

Jesus wept, complains Joe. Is nothing sacred? Do we have to drown listening to this shit? Give me some decent music Fabián. Gene Vincent, some rockabilly. Something with a bit of fucking twang.

Unfortunately we can’t receive redneck America this far south Joe, says Fabián, with his expressionless face. Otherwise I would be delighted to oblige you with some hillbilly shit.

Rockabilly man, not hillbilly.

Fabián has a sly smile flitting across his face. He loves to needle Joe, already. The cigarette bursts its sweet cargo into my lungs, and I swim with pleasure, think about the radio waves lapping around the earth.