Hemispheres (39 page)

Are you sure? I say. Hospital were talking about getting you stabilized again, sending you home. They don’t think things are
that far advanced.

His face cracks and a sharp laugh barks out.

Advanced. That’s a good one. Try
drowning in my own fluids
. Slowly. Ask them to give me. A leaflet about that one.

Outside the drawn curtain a trolley rattles up the long ward, crockery rattling.

Before too long. I’m going to be incapable Dan. I can’t let them have control over me. It’s got to be now.

I can do it, he says, when I offer to help him. He levers his body, still in the hospital gown, across the gap, his chest
rattling and veins jumping out on his temples. He settles into the wheelchair, breathing heavy and shallow.

I could murder. A fucking ciggy, he says, grinning. Get the oxygen.

I raise an eyebrow, detach the oxygen cylinder from the wall and hang it from the back of the chair. Hand him the mask.

You’re still in your hospital gown, I say. You’ll freeze.

There’s a coat. In the locker, he says.

I open the door and pull out his old donkey jacket, huge and black and frayed. It gives off that sharp scent of old sweat
and cigarettes. Tears spring to my eyes and I force them back. Drape the jacket around his thin shoulders, tuck it behind
his back. He reaches out a hand and turns the collar up and we move out through the pink curtain and into the ward, heading
for the lift.

Out in the car park the black bulk of the hospital juts into a night sky
low and damp with the orange gloaming of Stockton. I look up at the windows, postage stamps of light in the flanks of the
vast building. Yan transfers himself from the chair to the passenger seat, straining and grunting but accepting no help. I
slot the oxygen cylinder into the footwell between his knees, hand him the mask.

Thanks Doris, he says. Fold up the chair and. Put it in the boot. Have you got a tyre lever? And a torch?

In the boot, I say. Why?

He smiles enigmatically, skin puckering like vellum.

At the Glebe shops he taps my arm and motions for me to pull over. I find a parking space.

Golden Virginia, he says. Green Rizla. You’re paying.

I look at him in disbelief.

Last request of. A dying man, he croaks, eyes twinkling.

I get out of the car, swearing under my breath. Buy the tobacco and papers, dodge through a group of kids banging a football
against the parade of shops. They look at me blankly with eyes like stones and I hurry back to the car and hand him the little
bundle. He takes it and palms it into his jacket pocket with a wink. As we approach Norton roundabout he leans over.

Straight on here, he says, tapping my arm.

Hospice is right, I say, flipping the indicator on and drifting over into the right-hand lane.

We’re going. Straight on, says Yan, in a firm metallic voice.

He flips the indicator off and I cut back into the middle lane. A horn blares behind me.

Where are we going? I say, irritated.

You’ll see, he says. How’s Kelly?

I fight back tears again, grimly.

She’s fine, I say. More than fine. She’s really sorting herself out.

Good, he says. She’s a smart lass.

*

Julie levers her body down into the pit from above. It’s another leaden day, still dark around the edges, and the developer’s
machines are at work on the plot next door, a flock of metal geese on the winter fields with yellow articulated necks rising
and falling, taking huge bites of soil and subsoil and clay. She kneels down next to the skeleton, pulls a large finds bag
from her pocket, and begins with the tip of her trowel to lift a bone at a time and slip it inside. Beginning at the feet.
No reason, just personal preference. Jelly babies, chocolate santas, gingerbread men. Saving the best bit for last. The head,
studded with sweets. The brute beak like a bludgeon. Tarsals and metatarsals first, the long toes and claws. Then she moves
on to the legs, the strange flexures of ankle and knee, the bones flipping easily from the crumbly soil inside the pit.

The Cape of Good Hope, he says. Funny to see part of your life. Turned into archaeology.

He plonks himself down on the stump of the chimney breast. Surveys the rubble, wall footings poking out among the brick fragments,
the chunks of concrete, the broken glass. I can see his bony legs under the gown, purple with varicose veins, hospital slippers
still on his feet. The donkey jacket, now securely buttoned up, looks incongruous above this.

Ever been back Dan?

No. I’ve driven past, like. Never wanted to stop.

He produces a roll-up from his jacket pocket, already assembled into that characteristic matchstick-thin form. The lighter
blossoms like a pallid moth in the darkness and I hear him cough gently. He pulls smoke wilfully into the ruined lungs, but
not with the usual deep and satisfied inhalations. Instead, he takes short and furtive drags, the smoke emerging from mouth
and nostrils almost immediately. I can’t equate this little plot with the rambling building where I spent my childhood. Above
us floats the space where we ate and slept and dreamed and argued, now liberated from earth and materiality.

Kate, he says. Used to see ghosts. Right where you’re standing.

Me too, I think. They never hung around long enough to be sure. Always out of the corner of my eye. Something moving or shimmering.
Turned out to be a fucking gas leak anyway.

Oh aye?

Yeah. That old boiler was pissing carbon monoxide. Not enough to kill us but enough to give you weird dreams. Hallucinations,
like.

The ghosts were just gas dreams, he says. I’m almost sorry about that. Maybe we’re just gas dreams Danny. The whole thing.

He shivers and the rain drifts across.

Time has moved past me, he says. Pretty soon I’ll be marooned. Like some island you look back at. When you’re steaming past
on the ferry.

That’ll be some island, I say. A dramatic landscape.

Oh aye. Contorted mountains and brooding lochs. Snowfields and glaciers. Volcanoes blasting lava.

That’s the difference between you and me, I say. I’d settle for the warm house and the cat curled up on my lap, for a patch
of garden and a patch of sky. I’d be watching a flock of starlings unfurl like a silk scarf. You’d be scouring the bushes
for a Siberian vagrant.

Yan opens his mouth. Closes it again.

Remember Paul? I say. Coming through the door right there with that maniac smile on his face, steaming right into Franco.

Aye. I remember.

Tell me what you and Paul did with Hagan. You wrapped him in black plastic and you put him in the boot. You drove off and
nobody saw him again.

Pest control, he says.

Did you kill him?

The question seems to spill from the ruined fabric of the pub.

He laughs, shakes his head.

All in good time.

And what about Michelle?

She was a smack rat.

Only after you kicked her out. They took her baby into care. Found
Michelle strung up from a light socket in the Social Club bogs.

I never made her sleep with them spare pricks, he snaps. Stupid bitch. And I never sold her the gear.

He gets painfully to his feet.

Danny, he says. I’m running out of breath.

I catch him by the arm and we totter back to the car where he drinks hungrily from the mask.

After the feet and legs, Julie moves on to the spine and the ribcage. The vertebrae come first, little knurled punctuation
marks of bone knotted into one another like a jigsaw. She picks each one out separately, beginning at the tail end, revealing
the empty channel where the spinal column of the bird once ran, where neural signals pulsed and jumped like a river of electricity.
She drops the last of the vertebrae into the skeleton bag like a strange variety of boiled sweet. Then she moves on to the
ribs, peeling them up from the ground, long and slender and easy.

Yan hunches in the car like an old feller with his spine sagging. We drive back along the northern edge of the site. It was
once an impenetrable forest of steel and pipework but now it’s much sparser, clearings of open ground between the surviving
plantations, expanses of gravel and rubble where colonies of willow herb flutter in summer.

Pull over, he says. Into the car park.

But there are concrete blocks across the entrance so I stop on the roadside and we look up at the building, a cast concrete
hulk eight storeys high. Used to be the main admin offices for the whole site, the largest chemical operation in Europe. Now
it’s derelict and surrounded by mesh fencing with the windows and doors boarded shut. Stark notices warn of dog patrols. Plants
have got their roots in between the concrete panels in the car park and are prising them apart.

Billingham House, he says. Had my first job here, way back. Didn’t last long, mind. Get the wheelchair. And the tyre lever.

He opens the door and begins to prise himself out. I grab at his sleeve.

Hang on, I say. What’s going on?

He rights himself outside the car and bends creakily down to peer inside.

We’re going. For a walk.

I kill the engine and walk wearily round to retrieve the chair. It snaps back into shape without putting up much of a struggle.
Yan subsides into it.

Where to? I say.

He points into the car park like a maharajah directing an elephant.

It’s locked up, I protest. There’s security. Asbestos.

Asbestos, he barks. Now I’m fucking scared.

I make my way over to the fencing. The nuts joining the panels are only finger tight, so I fumble at the cold metal and free
a panel to create a path for the chair. Then we’re in the car park, wheels rumbling gently across the perishing concrete.
We reach the base of the offices, where the barbed wire of bramble and elder is starting to coil from cracks and crevices.

Use the tyre lever, Yan says. Open some of the boarding. And we can get in.

This is mental, I blurt out in exasperation, passing a hand across my crown. It’s dangerous in there. They’ve stripped out
everything – there are open shafts from top to bottom, eight floors deep. And you’re in no condition to go in. We’ll get ourselves
arrested.

A long pause. Yan raises himself slowly from the chair, hands braced against the frame, and stands facing me.

I need to die on my feet, he says. Not in a bed. Not swimming in a night sweat of morphine. On my feet, like a king in the
Dark Ages. This has gone on too long. I’ve been letting you. Do it your way. But now I’m taking back control. I need to see
the flames of the Chimera. One last time.

You can do what you like, I say, bitterly. You always did. But I don’t have to be part of it. I’ll be in the car.

I turn away and start to walk back towards the broken fence.

Danny.

The power of his voice stops me and I turn round. He is still standing, gaunt and unsupported, by the chair, the tails of
his gown blowing about his ankles in the spare wind.

I can’t get up there. Without you. If you help me, I’ll finish the story. You’ll know everything.

She looks at the outstretched wings and feels loath to disturb them. Once the wrists and fingerbones of an earthbound reptile,
stretched by time into these miraculous structures. Birds don’t even think about it, do they? The way crows just stroll into
the air without thinking. You’re about to hit the brakes, but they simply step backwards and gust into the air, out of harm’s
way. Julie begins to prise up the meta-carpals and carpals, and then the delicate radius and ulna, entwined like creepers.

Inside the building I flip the torch on. Concentric circles of watery light illuminate the bare interior of a lobby with a
concrete stair leading up towards the next floor. There’s a corridor running away into darkness like a derelict mineral working,
and the torch throws deep, startling shadows of Old Testament black. Yan points towards the stairwell and waves away my offer
of help. He holds on to the banister and begins to drag himself up the stairs, lifting and placing each foot deliberately,
veins standing out in his neck and sweat clustering at his temples. We reach the next landing and he pauses, gasping for breath.
I flick the torch down abandoned galleries running away along the seams of the night, and we climb on, footfall echoing dully
through the empty concrete halls.

By the sixth floor he’s almost gone. Visibly diminished, shrivelling slowly into the night.

I knew, he says. I’d have to climb those stairs. In the end. Face what was at the top.

Your dream, I say.

Yes. It’s funny. How you end up. In the same place. However much you struggle. Maybe that was the truth. I died there. And
this track is shrivelling up now. Almost nothing left.

There’s plenty left, I say.

I give him my arm and he grips it and we struggle up the last two flights and our shadows are mocking us in the deepest bitterest
black.

Along here, he coughs, showing me the corridor.

We stumble along, looking for the service stairs up onto the roof. Halfway along the corridor two panes of darkness open up
in the floor and I shine the torch into one of them and see the light ricochet down eight floors. The damp sides of the lift
shaft glitter a dull metallic blue. I stand on the edge and look down and my insides are tingling and one more step would
ensnare me in that long slow delicious tumble into the neutron star.

There’s a limpid gust of flame as Yan sparks his lighter. The smell of petrol, shadows dancing.

Brought this all the way with me, he says. All the way from the Falklands.

Thought you didn’t believe in talismans.

No. Didn’t do Jonah no good. Can’t believe he span you that line. About Schrödinger’s cat.

Said we were caught between life and death. All I had to do was open the box.

It’s still shut, he says. Did I die there, or do I die here? Am I a man or a ghost or a gas dream? You bring the hammer down
and sparks fly up. Thousands of them. Tunnelling into the night. But every track cools and shrivels and dies.