Black Car Burning Read online

  Black Car Burning

  HELEN MORT

  Contents

  Hillsborough

  Him

  Pitsmoor Road

  Alexa

  Norfolk Park

  Leigh

  Shining Clough

  Him

  Wharncliffe

  Leigh

  Stanage

  Alexa

  Page Hall

  Him

  Kelham Island

  Alexa

  Millhouses

  Leigh

  Harpur Hill

  Leigh

  Robin Hood’s Cave

  Alexa

  Brincliffe Edge

  Alexa

  Hillsborough

  Leigh

  Turning Stone Edge

  Him

  Sharrow Vale

  Alexa

  The River at Froggatt

  Leigh

  Burbage Edge

  Alexa

  Alport Castles

  Leigh

  Kinder

  Alexa

  Rivelin

  Leigh

  Ladybower Quarry

  Alexa

  Burngreave Ward

  Alexa

  General Cemetery

  Leigh

  Derwent

  Leigh

  Bamford Edge

  Pete

  Sheffield-on-Sea

  Alexa & Leigh

  Abney Moor

  Alexa

  Redmires

  Leigh

  Hathersage

  Alexa

  Pitsmoor Road

  Leigh

  Division Street

  Alexa

  The Don

  Leigh

  The Trees

  Leigh

  Hillsborough Inquest, 2016

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Helen Mort was born in Sheffield in 1985, and grew up in nearby Chesterfield. Five times winner of the Foyle Young Poets Award, she received an Eric Gregory Award in 2007 and won the Manchester Young Writer Prize in 2008. Her first collection, Division Street (2013), was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and Costa Poetry Award, and won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. In 2014, she was named as a ‘Next Generation Poet’, the prestigious accolade announced only once every ten years, recognising the 20 most exciting new poets from the UK and Ireland. No Map Could Show Them (2016), her second collection, about women and mountaineering, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Helen has been the Wordsworth Trust Poet in Residence and the Derbyshire Poet Laureate and was named one of the RSL’s 40 under 40 Fellows in 2018. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and lives in Sheffield. Black Car Burning is her first novel.

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  poetry

  Division Street

  No Map Could Show Them

  For Jess

  ‘There are days when, driving home from some gloomy hole in the hillside near Bolton, you wish the whole world was like this: white bungalows on a hill, floating against a blue cloud full of rain. A one-track road looping across the moor. Old pop music on the radio. Sore fingertips. Nothing ever again but crags you have never seen before, made of a wonderful new kind of rock.’

  M. John Harrison, Climbers

  Hillsborough

  Today the sky is full of thunder. Great gobs of cloud above the Penistone Road. The girls don’t have an umbrella and they’re shrieking, laughing as the rain starts to strike. Three of them, outside the sandwich shop, hair in identical braids. The two blondes have their heads bowed together, leaving the third out. One cups something in her hands. They giggle, call their friend over and tip it down the back of her neck, but she doesn’t flinch. When they’re bored, they walk on and the brunette stays a pace or two behind, eyes fixed on her trainers. The clouds are grey knuckles above them. I watch them drag their feet towards the park, and I watch the man, too. I notice how carefully he parks his van outside Cee Dees, stares at the glass as if his reflection is a face on a ‘Missing’ poster. He’s hesitating beneath the boards. Tuna Mayo. Corned Beef. Cheese and Pickle. He lifts his hand up. Builders are leaning against the counter in their hi-vis. The man walks out without buying anything, opens and closes the boot of his car. Inside, there are two coiled, fluorescent half-ropes, just in case. Climbers’ ropes. I know him. I never forget a face. I could have done the first inquest myself if I had a voice. I can speak, though, if you know how to listen. I speak in blown litter by the tram stop, a bird trapped in the flue of a house. I clear my throat and it sounds like traffic on Middlewood Road. I speak like the spin of a tumble dryer in the Valley Cleaners laundrette, faster, faster, so you have to bend to hear. I watch the man drive away. I keep watching him. It begins to pour.

  Him

  He was never sure where Hillsborough began. Mid-morning, sun on the windscreen like a knife, thin and bright from the storm clouds. He’d call it pot-luck weather, rainbow weather if you were jammy. At the Shalesmoor Roundabout, he almost pulled out in front of a lorry and the driver slammed his palm down on the horn.

  Open your fucking eyes.

  He tried to keep fixed on the road, ignoring every landmark. He knew this route by heart, roads the shape of his own veins. He passed the turn-off to the climbing wall, the river stretching away to the east of Penistone Road, glassy and quick, clogged with shopping trolleys. Somewhere out right, he sensed the bones of the old dry ski slope on the hill, abandoned now. Then he passed the flash expanse of the car showrooms. The New Barrack Tavern with its bold yellow window frames. Swann-Morton Limited, the huge leisure centre with its bright struts. He indicated left, following signs for Stocksbridge.

  It was on him before he knew it. Catch Bar Lane, the stadium. The more he tried not to look up, the more he knew it was there. The car juddered: he was in the wrong gear and almost stalled. Leppings Lane, a sign like any other.

  He got half a mile down the road before it hit him, and the memory itself was like a tunnel. The ground tilting away, the air scarce. Everybody jostling to move, raising themselves to breathe, somebody lifting a young lad – maybe eleven, maybe younger – up and away. Then the memory was around him, a holding pen, a pen with meshed fencing, and a woman was lurching towards him, gradually turning purple in the face, a man was scrambling his way up the fencing, clawing at holds. He put the radio on, like always: Hallam FM. It was not so difficult to sing along. As he drove slowly down Middlewood Road, and as the flats petered out and he started to notice the height of the trees, the sparse landmarks of Oughtibridge, he imagined the tunnel closed off, a darkness sinking over it. He imagined himself leaving it behind, then he glanced in the rear-view mirror to check he had.

  * * *

  In Wharncliffe he parked past the garage, the place where the track was badly kept and rocky. He killed the ignition and sat there for a moment with his hands steepled on the wheel. In the afternoon quiet, he felt as if he was still moving. Like when you step off a funfair ride and everything keeps going. The tightness in his chest was back. He got out and slammed the door, didn’t bother to lock it. He crossed to the track without looking and set off into Wharncliffe Woods.

  You could go in circles here. Once, coming down from the crag at sunset on his own, he’d missed a turn-off and followed a path he thought he recognised until it was almost dark. He’d seen nobody, convinced himself there was no way out of the woods. In the end, he fetched up at a pool where a man was throwing a stick to a muddy Labrador. In the half-light, he wasn’t sure if they were real. Then the bloke whistled and his pet loped back towards the copse. They both stared right past him, man and dog, as if he was the ghost. He thought of them again now as he neared the tunnel. Locals used to say there we
re dragons in the woods, a beast slayed by a knight in Sheffield armour. Now, it was all the same myth: the dragons, the Deepcar railway station. Even the climbers. Once, he found a young lad sleeping rough in the clearing, his bivvy bag damp and filthy and covered with dark spots, scraps beside him that might have been the bones of rabbits. The boy’s face had reminded him of another face. It had happened before, like that: a lad on the bus, glancing round to look at him, and suddenly the years collapsing, the day caved in. I can’t reach you. I can’t get to you. You’ll have to climb down.

  He followed the steepening path. It was eerily quiet, apart from the distant sound of the Stocksbridge Bypass. When he came out of the trees, the crag stretched away like a long wrist, something you could almost hold. He noticed the hum of pylons, tried to count them. There was something sombre about their vigil. It was hard to walk along the top of Wharncliffe once you left the path, but harder to pick your way along below the crag, giant blocks of stone making you stumble. He stood on the top and tried to breathe. When he did, the pressure on his chest lifted, but as soon as he exhaled, it was back. He felt sick. Not nauseous, but as if something was filling him. He stared hard at the bypass, the sewage works, the distant, scrappy flats. How could you love Sheffield, standing like this? But he did. Always had. The wide, fast road. The sky like something almost rubbed out. Years ago, when he was courting Angela and the scent of her perfume and the heat of her hand in his made him shy still, he’d stood here with her. What do you see in it? she’d asked and he’d shrugged.

  Today he had brought nothing. He clambered down, slipping, righting himself, until he was at the bottom, beneath the square walls. Wharncliffe always felt like a closed room. When you were on top, the woods seemed open. Down here, everything hemmed you in. Short routes. Sharp corners, wide, imposing cracks. This was all he needed. He zipped his jacket up, then wondered why he had. He was in his approach shoes and the route was just a few metres to his right. He had chosen it because of the landing. The stone prows, the overcrowded boulders and hewn-off bits of rock, how the ground shelved towards the woods. He did not think of anyone. He tried to picture Angela, but he couldn’t. When he shut his eyes at the foot of the route, he saw a sea cliff in Wales instead. A Dream of White Horses maybe. Nobody on it, just the wheel of a gull in the air. He began to climb then, imagining it was the sea below him now. His foot slipped on the first ledge and he felt his heart lurch, despite himself.

  Hand, then foot. He was almost at the top before he knew it. Stopping, he faced the rock. There was nothing spectacular to see anywhere. The hum of the pylons seemed to grow around him and he thought about what it would be like to have climbed one of those instead, the crackle and thrill of them, the hugeness of the struts up close. He remembered the boy on the fencing. The boy who would have been a man by now. Let go.

  In the end, he couldn’t go through with it. He held tight. He clung to the rock until it was dusk and his fingers were chill from being clenched. He hung on. When it was completely dark, he climbed down very slowly and wept like a child.

  At home, on the sofa until dawn, he stared at the small light of his phone. Google. A bar where you could search for anything, find what you liked. His mind was blank.

  Hillsborough is a village, townland and civil parish in County Down, Northern Ireland.

  The Hillsborough disaster was a human crush.

  Hillsborough (grid reference SK332896) is a suburb in north-west Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England.

  The story of Hillsborough is the story of 96 individuals.

  Hillsborough is blooming once again after winning the Large Village category in the 2015 Translink Ulster in Bloom competition.

  The real tragedy of Hillsborough is the families of the 96.

  The truth about Hillsborough is still out there.

  Hillsborough is the cheapest day out for Yorkshire football fans.

  Pitsmoor Road

  Here’s a girl. Here’s a woman, alone. She’s got blonde hair and a police uniform, sitting on the wet grass, just shy of Burngreave, between the trendy bars near Kelham Island and the start of Pitsmoor. It’s always me she comes back to, always my fat green shoulder. I don’t know why. But I like to guess what she’s thinking. She’s looking at the tops of tower blocks and offices to the west, remembering a drawing she once saw that could be my portrait. She’s thinking if she could draw the city, she’d put more spaces in. She’d draw it the way it looks in her mind when she tries to plan a route. The supermarkets and roundabouts the size of marbles, the Porter like a pencil line and other things looming massive: the neat square of Devonshire Green, her dad’s house, the old rec with the broken tyre swing and chipped wood floor, places she can’t go to any more. She’d take a marker and do everything with thick, black lines around it. She’d sketch the way she used to as a child, when she was young enough to get pocket money but old enough to practise kissing on the back of her hand. I draw a breath and suck the sun back in. Eventually, she stands up, but she won’t leave just yet, not until the moon comes out.

  Alexa

  In a house to Alexa’s right, a light came on in an upstairs window and a woman peered through the curtains, trying not to be seen. There was always someone watching her in Page Hall, someone turning to their partner or their kids in the room behind them and saying, What are they going to do about it, then?

  She clipped her walkie-talkie onto her belt, started to speak before she reached them.

  ‘You need to move along, please.’

  They looked at her and some of them moved back out of the glare of the street lights. Others started talking again, a rising murmur. She was supposed to know some words in Roma – all of the community support officers were. They’d sat through classes after hours with that brisk woman from the local authority, the one with pinstriped legs. She could repeat the words then, but as soon as she was here – out on the street with the sodium lights and the scuffed front doors and the barbed wire around the back walls – it all leaked out of her head. To help strengthen our relationship with the Roma community in Page Hall, the dedicated police team have learned the basics of their language, so that issues can be dealt with more quickly and to allow our officers to better engage with residents. She could see her boss, Bill Apsley, with his spokesman face on, getting the words right, putting everything in the correct order.

  ‘You need to go now, OK?’

  Someone was playing music too loud from a bedroom window. Dancehall or reggae. She’d have to deal with that later. She could hear lads laughing on the main road, outside the takeaway. Someone shouting for Damo. Oi, Damo! Get here! The Roma men were moving along now, without really looking at her. They’d be back once she was gone and the woman from Number 16 would be at her window again, tutting behind glass.

  Alexa didn’t know how you could explain to someone that they couldn’t stand outside, together. Not in any language. That other people – people she couldn’t point to – thought they were in the way. That a few of them was OK, but too many of them was bad. Yes, that’s too many. Yes, that’s still too many. That was what people were always complaining about. There’s twenty of them in one house. The area’s changed. There’s loads of them, hanging round the streets. We can’t take any more. But they always could take more. They had to.

  She walked back, heading towards Firth Park Road. Night made everything strange. The piled-up sofas and stained mattresses in the gardens looked like new landforms. A house on the left had a bedsheet draped across the window instead of a curtain, but she could see through it into the living room, where at least ten people were crowded together, trying to watch TV or drink or just sit the evening out until dawn. She looked away and carried on, walking past the halal chip shop on Page Hall Road and Mega Fashion with its shutters down and the grocer’s. She passed the Pakistani Advice Centre, too, the place where the Page Hall Residents Association met. Every time she looked at it she thought about the conversations they must have about the police in there. All that shou
ting at the walls. They don’t do nowt. They move them on and then they’re back five minutes later. And where’s the police then?

  When she went to The Fat Cat or the Kelham Island Tavern down by the river with Dave and Sue on Fridays after work, it was all I didn’t join the police to do this after the third pint. Sue shaking her head sadly, talking about what areas like Parson Cross and Burngreave and Pitsmoor used to be like. Dave cracking the same jokes he’d been telling on the beat all week. All of them angry about Page Hall and the police needing a Section 30 or just needing more power. So that gathering after 9 p.m. could be a crime. All that anger and the empty pint glasses never big enough to hold it. Alexa couldn’t say I didn’t join the police to do this, because she didn’t know why she’d joined. She could answer if she was pressed. She could say it was something to do with coming from round here and wanting to give something. The kinds of things people say. But really, it wasn’t anything she could put into words. It ran deeper than that.

  A car sped past towards Barnsley Road, the driver over-revving the engine. Alexa took no notice. She was here to move people along. To listen to takeaway owners and shopkeepers complaining about the groups that gathered outside every night. To hear locals saying I’m not racist. They’ve got to respect how we do things here. Warning her trouble was brewing. That someone would take things into their own hands. And she’d explain what a PCSO could do, what efforts the police were making in Page Hall, and she’d stop listening to herself halfway through each sentence.

  There were other voices too. There were the eager teachers at the Academy who spoke proudly about the school’s thirty-eight languages, the four Roma speaking staff they’d employed. There was the elderly Jamaican woman Alexa often met beside the shops who shook her head at the papers, tutting this is 2015. And still you don’t know the words ‘love thy neighbour’? There were families of all nationalities chattering across back gardens, sharing food over the hedges. There were members of the Roma community who were met with smiles and back-slaps in the cafés. When rumours of a documentary TV crew started, Page Hall was alive with jokes and shared anger and conspiratorial, delicious suspicion kicked like a football in the alleys between the two-up two-downs. Who do they think we are? These streets brimmed with warmth and companionship. But it was the fear that cut through to Alexa, the fear that the police fretted about.