Authors: Phil Rickman
30
Blowtorch
S
O, OK, HE
was not
exactly
smashed, but far from sober, he’d admit that. No fit state to drive and that truly was a problem, the truck being their only vehicle. No way he was getting pulled over, losing his licence for at least a year.
So getting home tonight – not a prospect.
But, Jesus, there were times he might’ve cared more.
It was nearing midnight, a waxing moon and stars on show – not much light pollution from Hay, no traffic, no people. When Gwenda’s bar had closed and his drinking companions had gone home, Robin had walked the empty sloping streets, up and down stone steps, across cobbles, for over an hour, intent on clearing his head.
But his head had only filled up with the town. Starting with the Gothic clock tower, starlit, moonlicked, a fairytale touch like out of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Otherness.
He limped away from it, up a steep street to where the road divided, the junction watched over by the small statue in the apex of a building. He now knew this was Henry, first of the Tudor kings who’d passed this way after landing in West Wales, en route to his destiny.
More narrow streets, more hanging signs, and the next thing was the Buttermarket, like a Greek temple, with its locked iron gate. And then the sign which said
Bear Street
, bringing to mind an old photo he’d seen in one of the history books of a poor dancing bear brought into Hay as entertainment on market day.
The bear began a fractured dance, like in an old silent movie shot against stone walls, streetlights and the obsidian mirrors of darkened windows. Robin backed away, half closing his eyes, the town and its isolated lights breaking down into blown-up pixels of colour.
He stood his stick against a wall, opening out his hands, letting himself dissolve into the pattern. Trembling in that emotional place where, if things were good, your senses could sometimes soar. Nothing to do with Betty’s condition, this was a painter’s thing, beginning with an intense desire to discover, translate,
interpret
.
Feeling yourself into a place. He’d known it in the countryside, at dawn and twilight, but never in a town before. Couldn’t afford to paint it like Hockney did in Yorkshire, using several canvases fitted together, so he’d make do with a single sheet of white-primed hardboard on which images would be overlapping, details of Hay coalescing or superimposed one over the other. One glance, and you’d take in the whole town, subliminally. The town on a hillside, streets which had seemed parallel but in fact curled, one into another. He’d looked at them on a large-scale map and seen that the centre of the town actually formed a heart-shape, roadways like veins wound around it.
He followed a wall to the market square, directly under the jagged cliff-face of the castle, and it was here that the twinge had taken him, curling around his spine. Unable to move until it began to fade.
But it was in these moments of ebbing pain that his vision had begun to burn again, only so much more fiercely, like a blowtorch stripping everything before it, whole centuries crumbling away like worn stucco and he was close to crying aloud in this kind of atavistic ecstasy, as if the hours he’d spent in Gwenda’s bar had been a kind of initiation and now the town itself was admitting him.
Into its heart, the heart of Hay.
Was this possible?
* * *
Back under the clock tower, quivering inside, Robin sat on the edge of the terrace below the Granary. To his right Barclay’s Bank, to the left Golesworthy’s country outfitters. The bank was the only representation on this street of a national business. There were two or three other banks in Hay, but no chain stores that Robin had seen so far. A medieval town holding out against empty progress.
Betty said calmly in his ear, ‘Do you know how much you’ve had?’
‘Too much.’ Robin abandoned his original plan to say it was wine from a Welsh vineyard, how potent was that gonna be? ‘And I don’t see any cabs. And if I did, we’d have to get another cab in the morning to collect the truck. I fucked up.’
‘No kidding.’
‘In our position, do you turn your back on people who wanna make you feel welcome? Bottom line is I now know a whole bunch of booksellers.’
‘Better get a room somewhere, hadn’t you? Book into a hotel or a B and B.’
‘What?’ Robin changed ears with the phone. ‘No
way
.’
‘
Yes
.’
‘You know what all that costs in this town in high summer?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Listen—’
‘There’s a coat and some old sacks in the truck.’
‘You can’t sleep in the bloody truck!’
‘No, but I can take the stuff into Back Fold. Roll up some of the old curtains, make a pillow.’
Pause.
‘Not a good idea.’
‘It’s not cold, Betty. And this is my fault. And, like… why would it not be a good idea?’
‘Because I’m not there. And you have injuries. And you’re pissed.’
‘Just beyond passing a breath test is all. My senses are all functioning. In overdrive. I walk fine… fine as I ever walk. Not gonna be a prisoner of this. I can fit a key in a door. And the point is I have to do it. It’s right.’
‘You don’t have to do it at all. We’ve sold the bungalow.’
‘Huh?’
‘They came to look, they made an offer.’
‘Jeez! How much?’
‘Even first time round, it wasn’t a bad offer, but—’
‘Did they confirm it? Did they sign?’
‘I said we’d think about it and they—’
‘There’ll be others. Nobody takes the first offer. If we hold out, we can maybe get closer to the asking price.’
‘They came back not long afterwards with an offer of very nearly the asking price. Did you get that?’
‘I…’ He clamped the phone hard to his ear. ‘You’re saying…?’
‘It’s a done deal, Robin.’
‘Holy shit!’ His head had gone back, his eyes raised to the clock tower, and its face was a warm moon. ‘We’re… we’re saved! We can make this business
sing
.’
‘So book into a hotel,’ Betty said.
He felt tears on his cheeks, like the dew of a new morning. It was turning around. All in a few hours. Home. They were home.
‘I love you, Bets.’
‘Listen,’ Betty said. ‘The Black Lion do rooms. They’re probably still open. Or the Swan. Celebrate. Get a good meal or something.’
‘I don’t have enough money.’
‘Do it on the bloody debit card! What this has done, it’s bought us some time, Robin. We have time to get it right.
Please
.’
Robin was walking up the street in a giddy euphoria, up from the clock tower towards the market square. An eccentric arrangement, the clock tower actually below the market square so if you wanted to know the time you had to go seek it out, peer around corners.
Weird. He loved it.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Did I tell you we got the sign up? Not easily, but when you need help, these guys just appear.’ Not telling her what nearly happened; it hadn’t happened, and it was his fault anyway. ‘So how about we open tomorrow? Just open the doors, see what happens? Knowing that when the deal goes through we can buy a pile more books.’
‘Yes. Whatever. Meanwhile, book into a hotel, Robin. This is about letting go. Get a good night’s sleep, come home early tomorrow and I’ll be ready to go back with you, and we’ll talk on the way.’
‘OK.’
He walked raggedly under the statue of Henry Tudor, to the castle wall. Beyond it, the remains of the medieval keep was gazing jaggedly down from the highest point of the town. The hole where the portcullis had been was crudely boarded up. Like a wooden gag. He looked away, carried on past the war memorial, along Castle Street, where several shop windows had posters opposing plans by some supermarket giant to move into Hay, wipe out all the small food stores, clothing retailers, household electrical dealers. Bring in the big and the bright and the shiny and the new, piss all over the old.
Robin had a blurred memory of Connie Wilby, who’d spent the whole night smoking cigars in contravention of the law of the land, taking him on one side, telling him why
big
and
bright
and
shiny
and
new
were words with no meaning for the Hay economy.
‘You still there, Robin?’
‘Yeah, I’m here.’
And he
was
here. Standing in the entrance to the alleyway called Back Fold.
‘Get some sleep,’ Betty said.
Hay Castle was lofting up in front of him, moonlight-vast, all of its ages fused together by the shadows, the chimney stacks like the backs of hands turned black.
Different place at night, nobody else living this end of the alley. Jeeter Kapoor was with his wife and kids in a ground floor apartment in one of the new stone-clad blocks across town.
Robin carried this old UK air-force greatcoat he’d brought from the truck, the coat so stiff with age and disuse it almost stood up by itself when he put it down, along with three cleanish hessian sacks and a flashlight, to the door of Thorogood Pagan Books. He leaned his stick against the door to fumble for his keys, and there was a sour smell all over him, and...
‘Brekkin in, is it?’
Hell, she could move silently when she wasn’t whistling.
He held up the key and Mrs Villiers backed away from it like it was some kind of talisman for warding off old drunks.
‘En’t dead yet then?’
‘I’m sorry?’
Mrs Villiers did this kind of liquid chuckle. She had these small, round, monkey eyes.
‘Thought you was, boy. Thought you was dead.’
‘Huh?’
He saw a screw-top wine bottle poking out of a pocket of the long, frayed coat.
‘Cherry don’t do it n’more.’
‘No? Mrs Villiers...’ Robin tried to focus on her through the fumes. ‘Who we talking about? Who did you think I was?’
‘Put her up at my place one night, for free. I sez don’t you go there no’more, see.’
‘Whadda you mean? Who?’
‘I sez one day you won’t come out.’
‘Who?’
‘And her di’n’t. Was it you? Was it
you
?’
‘Listen,’ Robin said, ‘whatever you’re saying, I think I need to know this stuff. Talk to me.’
But she’d gone. She moved fast, Mrs Villiers. He stood staring down the alley until the whistling came curling around the chimneys like ribbon.
* * *
He carried the stiff greatcoat and the sacks up the wooden stairs to the sitting room. There wouldn’t be room to eat in the back kitchen downstairs, so they’d brought a pine table and some chairs up here. What they hadn’t brought – one for the removal van – was the sofa.
The
sofa. Just like they only had one bed. The only two items you sleep on, and they’d be the last to arrive.
He went through to the first of the two bedrooms, divided by a blockboard partition which he was sure would disintegrate like a wall in an air raid if you lightly applied a shoulder to it. Not a stick of furniture in either room. The low rooms up here, you could tell they must once have been no more than a loft, maybe a hay store for animals waiting to die.
Back Fold ran with blood. Echoed to the sounds of bellowing
.
Robin inhaled massively. He couldn’t stay here.
But, more than that, he couldn’t leave. They had... hell, they had a business to start tomorrow.
Would have to be the bathroom, with its shaving bar which lit up mauve when you pulled the string. No mirror, only a grey-white wall, a basin and a lavatory. The bath ran the length of the opposite wall under a small, square window the one where, if you put your head out, you could see the castle.
He went back to the living room, pulled all the flat cushions off the dining chairs. Back in the bathroom, he tossed them in the bath with the sacks spread on top then shambled over to the lavatory and took a piss, standing to the side so the shaving light would show him where the bowl was. A bronchitic cough when he pulled the chain – or maybe that was him – before the water came coughing out.
He eased off his jacket and rolled it up as a pillow, trapping it under an arm. Unlaced his trainers but kept them on, as he pulled the string to douse the depressing mauve light, before climbing unsteadily into the cushioned bath.
Standing there, putting off the moment when he’d have to try and lie down. Turning around to lean over to the small square window and its view of the castle’s curtain wall and the sloping roofs rammed into it, to a stripe of sky and moonlight like crumpled chocolate-foil left on the stone. Behind it, the castle itself, invisible in the night, maybe dreaming of the old nights of blood and fire.
He turned away from the window, sinking down, in hurting stages, into the bath. Dragging the greatcoat over himself, like a rough sleeper in a high-street doorway, folding his body on to the side that gave him least pain – a close contest at the best of times.
Telling himself he’d had worse beds. Would’ve handled this no problem back in the day, when women eyed him in the street, with his long, dark pagan hair and his wide pagan grin made dangerous by a black stubble which now featured sad, pointillist dabs of white. Looking like the warrior he could never be.
He contrived to fold himself into the enamel bunk, drawing up his knees. Thinking himself back into the warm, pixillated streets and the soft lights. Everything bathed in a pinkening mist as he fell thickly asleep.
Whenever he awoke in pain, he shifted a little and sank back into the sleeping town letting go like a spirit in warm air with no reassembled bones to slow him up. Down Back Fold into Castle Street, and then the market square, under the cliff face of the castle, down to the clock tower, into High Town, Lion Street, Bear Street, history unfolding, the pink deepening until the heart of the town, blood-red now, became his own heart, swollen, throbbing and twisted, as if his chest had been opened, his ribs parted to let someone’s fingers start feeling in between the arteries, gripping the organ like a soft orange and...
ah no
...
He awoke fully this time, gasps torn out of him like rags, as he heaved himself up too quickly in the clammy bath, his face creamed with sweat, his nose and throat thick with mucus, a
familiar agony jagging up his left leg as his eyes opened into cold early light, which...