Black Car Burning Read online

  She called in to the chippy, the one she often ended up in. The owner always reminded her of someone, and she liked him for that. The backs of his hands had swallows tattooed across them, bluish now. He was the kind of person you thought you might have spoken to in a pub once at last orders, surprising yourself how easy the conversation was. His slicked-back hair was trying to remember the shape of a quiff. He had a circle of gold in one ear and a smoker’s cough. When he smiled, his teeth were the same colour as the fish batter.

  ‘All right, love.’

  It was too hot. The smell of fat and vinegar socked her in the face.

  ‘All right. Been busy?’

  ‘Steady,’ he said.

  The walls were covered in old Pukka Pies posters. One showed a blonde woman and a well-built man reclining under the sheets, sharing a pie. The picture next to it was of a businessman, driving his open-top sports car with a Pukka Pie occupying the front seat, a fork sticking out of the middle of it.

  ‘Any trouble this week?’

  He stopped shovelling chips into a cone and laughed.

  ‘Get this, right. Thursday, I had two of them gyppo teenagers trying to sell me a baby. Didn’t speak hardly any English. Took me ages to work out what they were saying. I thought one of them had something tucked under his jacket … Tiny kid. Just born.’

  ‘A baby?’ If she stared at him hard enough, kept her gaze level, perhaps she’d know if he was lying.

  ‘They wanted 250 quid for it.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ve already told your lot about it.’

  ‘Would you know them if you saw them again?’

  ‘They’ve not been back. I gave them a fucking earful. God knows where they went after here.’

  ‘That’s shocking.’

  Alexa hated the way she could only ever think of the obvious thing to say. That’s terrible. That’s shocking. How awful for you. But what else was there? Sometimes, she wished she could think sideways like her girlfriend. Caron would know how to respond.

  ‘It’s disgusting.’ He was piling the chips up too high in the cone, sinking the shovel too deep. ‘I were speechless.’

  ‘I can’t even think about it.’

  ‘I’m not being funny, love, but it’s your job to think about it, in’t it?’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘I mean, I know you’re doing your best. I know you’re out on the streets trying to move them along, but something’s got to blow. Sooner or later.’

  ‘So you say.’

  ‘I could tell you some right stories. It’s not them I mind, not most of them. But if they’re going to all move to Page Hall, they’ve got to learn to live by the rules. Our rules.’

  Alexa knew there was no point answering.

  ‘I don’t mind them when they’re not coming round trying to sell me babies … I’m going to the papers with that by the way. Most definitely.’

  ‘They’ll lap it up.’

  ‘Salt? Vinegar?’

  * * *

  On the way home from every shift, she couldn’t shake the habit of looking in through people’s windows. When they were lit up, it was almost like an invitation. Crossing the city from east to west, you’d see the living rooms and kitchens change, just as the houses got bigger and the streets got quieter. Once, near Owlerton, she saw a couple naked in an upstairs window, not doing anything, just standing together and looking out with mugs of tea. Back towards home, it was all ginnels and Nepalese prayer flags in the windows and tasteful plants. Chests used as tables. Large pine chairs. Streets where all the double-parked cars left at 7 a.m. and came back at 7 p.m. Where people argued about parking slots and didn’t realise how much space they’d got.

  Sometimes, she’d take the long route back, just to cycle past Dad’s house. It was the last one on the road. Often, he still had the light on when she went by. She was thinking about the baby, bundled up in a cardigan or in newspaper, like the hot parcels of fish and chips passed over the counter in the chip shop. The weight of the child as the mother gave it away. Dad’s house was dark tonight. It made her feel better, somehow, knowing he wasn’t behind any of the windows.

  When she got home, she took her boots off in the hall and tiptoed upstairs. Caron was like an Egyptian mummy under the duvet, thin sheets pulled up over her face. She had her back to Alexa and her breathing didn’t falter when Alexa slipped in beside her and kissed the back of her neck, just under the hairline. She thought about pressing her body against Caron’s to try to wake her up. Instead, she lay on her back in the dark.

  Last week, outside a house in Page Hall with the front door smashed in, she’d found an elderly Slovakian woman pacing the narrow stretch, back and forth, the same small square of light outside the house. When Alexa stopped to ask her if she was OK, she grabbed Alexa by the wrist, placed her other hand on top of her arm and started to talk. It was a stream of words, the same phrase repeated over and over. Alexa nodded as if she understood. She wrote the words down in her notebook later, spelling them wrong.

  It took her some time to look it up at home, face lit by the glow from her laptop, piecing the words together. When she did, she started.

  Do you believe in ghosts?

  She thought about Dad, the times when his silence seemed to grow over him like a second skin. The way he used to look past her. The things she could never see. As she closed her eyes in bed, she thought she was staring into a crowd. Red and greenish bodies behind her eyelids, very small. There were loads of them and they all seemed to teem together. A flock. No, denser than that. Packed like snooker balls in a triangle. Like a football stadium. But something denser than that, something that made it hard to breathe. Like how she imagined the Leppings Lane entrance, the stand, when people talked about Hillsborough. Because she had to imagine it, every time anyone said the word. She couldn’t just hear the name or have an abstract image.

  People in your face and over your face and everywhere around you. People blocking the light and people on the ground. People under your feet. She tried to look at the bodies until they became dots, shapes in a kaleidoscope. It never worked. Not really. Eventually, they turned into the crowds of Roma men outside the shops in Page Hall, men pushing and jostling and laughing with each other, and she could send them away just like she did every shift, back to their houses and out of her head. When the alarm clock went off, Alexa felt like she hadn’t even been asleep.

  Norfolk Park

  It’s early, not yet light. I’m stretched out like a sleeper – black pavements slick with rain. You leave the car engine running, but you get out of the driver’s seat. The door is left slightly ajar. You stand by the railings and take me in. The cholera monument is behind you, tall and slender, adorned with moss. In front, there are trains pulling out reluctantly, the distant sound of the announcer on the tannoy. Chinley. Stockport. Manchester Piccadilly. Manchester Oxford Road. You light the joint and light it again when the breeze snuffs it out. Inhale. Widnes. Liverpool South Parkway and Liverpool Lime Street. Exhale. The headlamps of the cars as they sweep past The Showroom. The high university buildings and the higher flats, the steeples and towers like needles, injecting the sky with dawn. Signs to Chesterfield, Barnsley, Rotherham. The shape of the moors in the distance, a dark cloth thrown over a tabletop. The stars above them. The satellites. The galaxy. The smell of something heavy, cloying as it fills the air. A single crane, still above the ex-workshops and foundries. The grass amphitheatre behind the station, a boy who is crouching, bending to write his name on the wall, beautifully, in three colours.

  Leigh

  Leigh squinted out of the pub window, through dregs of light. The clouds that had been scudding all evening were gone and now everything was drained. The wind couldn’t be arsed to blow and even the gritstone edges standing guard above Hathersage seemed less vivid than usual, teabag-coloured. Up there by the crag, the Popular End car park would be emptying now; vans taking school groups back to Sheffield, couples in patched-up down jackets wandering over to The Norfo
lk Arms, or down in to the village. A single kestrel overhead, perhaps, drawing circles in the air only it could see.

  She wished she was high up, in the half-light, underneath all the routes she knew by heart. Inverted V, Thunder Road, Ellis’s Eliminate – names said with respect and regret like the names of ex-lovers. She wanted to feel the rock around her fist, taking her skin off. A gritstone handshake. As if she could get inside the landscape for a second.

  ‘She’s called Caron by the way.’ Pete broke her reverie. ‘The lass you couldn’t take your eyes off earlier, the one looking at bouldering mats.’

  ‘Fuck off!’

  ‘She climbs E5. Well, she were climbing E5 last year.’

  It was quiz night in The Robin Hood and groups of women with fuchsia lipstick and spidery eyelashes were huddled round the best tables, but Pete didn’t want to do the quiz because it would be all friggin’ Lady Gaga and Take That, so they propped up the bar instead, Pete with his pint of Dizzy Blonde and Leigh with a half-full pint glass of red wine, because they’d run out of wine glasses. The microphone was broken, too, so a man with a triangle beard and a megaphone was leaning against the pool table, intoning questions.

  ‘Well, Pete, if I can’t have you …’ Leigh grinned at him.

  ‘Exactly!’

  ‘Body like that … You’re only twenty years past your prime.’

  Pete had been in the climbing shop long before Leigh started there. At first, she thought he was shifty, like an uncle at a wedding. When the manager introduced him, he didn’t lift his head. She clocked him. Wiry, athletic, with a shock of silver hair he ran his hand through when he was exasperated. Leigh was used to seeing men like him at the crags on Tuesday nights, fifty-somethings who’d been great climbers once, who’d lost some of their strength, but none of their skill and determination. Steady. Hard to age accurately. But there was something awry about Pete, too, something she didn’t quite trust. His glasses were on a string around his neck, tied with a piece of climbing tat and one side of his face seemed more closely shaven than the other. At first, she moved round him the way she’d step past strangers on a train, careful not to touch. But working side by side behind the counter every day, she became curiously dependent on his photographic memory for which guidebook was stored where, vaguely entertained by his habit of humming Simple Minds tunes under his breath. Within a month, they’d started climbing together. Within two months, they were drinking buddies, holed up in the overpriced, tartan-carpeted pubs around Hathersage and Grindleford, bitching about the management, idly speculating about routes they’d climb one day, on limestone and gritstone, ushering each other to bus stops and taxis at the end of the night. Leigh preferred him to the lads in their early thirties who climbed topless at The Works on Saturdays, their single earrings and their white-boy dreadlocks, the women in black crop tops, the clear chime of their voices. Before they set off up a route, they’d check to see who was watching. Pete was utterly unselfconscious.

  ‘I’m just saying. You were staring.’

  She fiddled with a beer mat. ‘I don’t know what you’re on about.’

  That was bullshit. Leigh remembered her. She was short, only up to Leigh’s shoulders. Mahogany hair, dyed and cropped below her ears. Unplucked eyebrows, the glint of a nose stud. Her weird, slow movements as she stooped to handle each mat in turn, freezing with her palms pressed into them. Like someone doing tai chi. Or taking the piss out of someone doing tai chi. In fact, she was the kind of person who looked like she was taking the piss all the time: she had a permanent half-smile, humming to herself as she moved round the climbing shop.

  ‘Didn’t buy owt anyway.’ Pete was talking too loudly now. ‘Her and the rest. If tomorrow’s that slow I’m bringing the dog to work.’

  ‘I thought I might have seen her bouldering a few times, that’s all.’

  ‘You should see her shoulders though, her back. Like a concertina. Nothing to her most of the time, but when she’s tensed …’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Just saying. You could climb like her if you tried.’

  ‘I’ve not got the bottle.’

  Pete looked at her for a moment.

  ‘No,’ he smirked. ‘Probably not.’

  ‘In what year was “Spinning Around” a hit for Kylie Minogue and what position did it reach in the charts?’ The megaphone rattled the whole room.

  Pete propped his arms on the table, leaned close to Leigh as if he was going to tell her a secret. ‘I heard Caron’s after a route on Apparent North. Something big.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Black Car Burning.’ He said it slowly.

  Leigh had heard of it before, a short, tough climb out at the very edge of Stanage, the part where the rocks begin to peter out into broken teeth, ground tumbling towards the lower moors. She’d always wondered why that clutch of boulders was called Apparent North, whether it meant nobody was really sure where north began in that edged, hemmed landscape. Black Car Burning was a hard route, arduous and steep, poor handholds under a great gritstone roof. It was an E7, so far beyond anything she could ever dream of climbing she’d never even glanced at it. But it wasn’t one of the classics either, not a test-piece climb like Careless Torque, a boulder problem on a prow of rock; or Archangel, a smooth, forbidding aerate with no holds on it, a sharp fin rising from the Plantation.

  ‘Why does she want it?’

  Pete shrugged. ‘Why not?’

  They were words Leigh wanted to say out loud. Black Car Burning, savouring the locked sound of it. She thought about the logic of route names. Valkyrie, named for a woman who could choose who would die in battle and who would survive. Chameleon, named for its shifting character, the awkward moves it forced climbers into. Black Car Burning was a name that seemed to smoulder, something acrid and tense about it. It made her think of sudden death, a car wrapped round a tree, or three men standing back with cans of petrol while the windows and doors went up in flames.

  ‘Have many women climbed it?’

  Pete swirled the last of his pint round in the glass. ‘My missus did,’ he said softly.

  Leigh stared at him. He hardly ever mentioned his wife. As if saying her name might irritate her ghost. Just then, a businessman in a suit with an off-putting sheen nudged their table on the way to join his friend at the bar, almost knocking Leigh’s wine over. The man smiled weakly, held his hands up, looked Pete and Leigh up and down, taking in their bashed knuckles, dirty jackets, the pair of rucksacks on the floor. Pete turned back and winked at Leigh.

  ‘See if he’ll get the wine in. Don’t mind if I leave you to it soon, do you?’

  ‘No, ’course not.’

  Pete was always the last to arrive and the first to leave. She never asked questions, even though she knew he was only going home to his empty terrace, back to the long night and the last measure of Johnnie Walker. She’s never set foot inside his house, but she understood what it felt like, needing to get back to nothing.

  Pete levered himself off the bar stool with an exaggerated groan.

  ‘Never know, you could be in there.’ He nodded at the two businessmen.

  ‘Christ, Pete.’

  ‘Get yourself a nice fella …’

  He hoisted his rucksack up on to his shoulders, nearly swiping the empty pint glass off the bar. Cackling and punching her on the shoulder, he was off out into the car park and the calm night, his stride quickening. Pete always walked as if he’d just seen someone he recognised, or someone he wanted to avoid. Head down. Shoulders forward. It was the walk of the professional loner.

  Megaphone man approached the bar, seemed to holler right in her ear.

  ‘What is the real name of the singer Lady Gaga?’

  Leigh drained the rest of her wine in one.

  * * *

  Back at the house, Tom was waiting for her outside, shivering slightly in a summer jacket. He’d got the last bus over from Sheffield to surprise her. He clearly hadn’t expected her to be out. Perhaps his girlfr
iend was away for the weekend, or drinking Prosecco with her manicured friends. She’d learned not to ask. In the light from the porch, his cheekbones seemed sharper, his black hair shone. She couldn’t help taking him in, angular and still. He was kissing Leigh before she’d even got the door open. Inside, he held her face in both hands, then moved them down to her waist, tugged at her belt. She pushed him away gently. He followed her upstairs.

  What she wanted wasn’t sex. Not really. Or not the most part of it, the shoulder-gripping and swearing. Not that endless swimming, treading water under Tom’s body, looking up at him open-mouthed. They were on the bedroom floor now for no good reason, on the landlord’s oatmeal rug. She was holding her knickers to one side. What she wanted was the moment just before he entered her. The relief of knowing it was going to happen. Just that and no more. Like this all had a beginning.

  She could see his shadow on the wall, the outline of his back. She thought about Black Car Burning then, a crouched, intent body of rock. A smoke-coloured surge. That morning, driving into the village, there’d been a cloud inversion over the whole valley, pure white. She’d taken the bends slowly for once. It felt like she was driving into the sea.

  ‘Stop,’ she said. ‘There.’