Black Car Burning Read online

  The man would not get off the train. The doors didn’t shut. Rob strained towards him like a dog on a leash, though he couldn’t get close. Her dad’s grip on her hand was a vice. She could feel herself going wobbly, her knees first, then everything else. She closed her eyes and tried to pretend she was back in her room, at night, one of those nights that didn’t exist any more, when Mum would come back from the climbing wall smelling of chalk, and read her the story about the three little pigs, while Dad clattered plates downstairs, getting tea ready for her. She was not imagining it hard enough. The train kept getting back in. People were on top of her, she could tell even with her eyes shut.

  Uncle Rob’s voice and the man’s voice twisted round each other until they became one. Now someone else was shouting at Rob, a man with a Cockney accent, saying Calm down, mate. There’s no need to fucking swear. Rob saying I’m not fucking swearing, mate. Mate. Everyone repeating it, using it like a full stop. Alexa’s dad didn’t say anything at all. Eventually, the fat man inched his way just far enough into the carriage and the doors collapsed shut and the train carried on, slower than ever, and there was silence all the way, apart from people sighing and breathing and clearing their throats.

  They had to push themselves out at King’s Cross, wriggling through the crowd. The platform seemed huge and cool. Rob had his hand on Dad’s shoulder.

  ‘You all right, pal?’

  ‘I’ll live.’

  He hadn’t let go of Alexa’s hand. She wondered how long it would take him to remember he was still holding on to her.

  Millhouses

  There’s a man asleep in the park bandstand again. From a distance, he looks dead. Half the night the trains shuttle back and forth to Chesterfield, carrying drunks and office workers who stay up too late. The wide road that separates the park from the woods is an invitation to escape, to keep going, to drive without looking back through Totley, neat semis turning into stone cottages, the long approach to a country house, where cattle grids make the car rattle and sheep stand in the road, their eyes lit a supernatural green by the headlamps. Sometimes a deer skitters back into the shadows or two rabbits stop to sniff the air, bodies quivering. How contained, how small they are. How their fear propels them, but gently. Above, a bird of prey roosts on a branch, beak curved like a brass hook, and the bats are barely known, invisible, making sounds no one can hear. Above the valley, the moon is a blood moon, tinged pink like the residue left inside an egg, a wound in the clouds, an incredulous mouth, the sky around it seeping.

  Leigh

  Leigh had left it a whole week. Now she wasn’t sure if Caron was here at all. The Sheaf’s taproom was very white, but the smoking ban hadn’t been kind to it – sweat and beer farts. Under one table, there was a dog the size of a small horse. Occasionally, it would shuffle out and unfold itself, large raindrops of saliva dropping to the floor. It surveyed the room with wood-coloured eyes and seemed disappointed or worried or just plain scared by what it found. The owner stared off into the distance, like the dog was nothing to do with him.

  Leigh had Jim Beam vision. Before she headed out, she’d finished the bottle that Pete had brought round to her place one lonely, rained-off night. Now everything seemed pleasantly far away. A workman in paint-stained boots taking up most of the bar, who hadn’t been home since clocking off. Someone in the corner who used to be a famous climber, holding court, a skinny lad with a beard more interesting than his face, hanging on every word. She could get her phone out and pretend to text someone. She had a new message.

  Hey. Where are you? xxxxx

  She ignored Tom’s text. Her map of Sheffield was a diagram of all the places she’d once argued with him. That corner by Arundel Gate, outside the Genting Club, where he’d asked her, half-joking, if she was the kind of person who could be lived with. The park near the hospital with no street lights where they walked, drunk, bickering about a film neither of them cared about. The station bar. Fargate. The Moor. Seams of disagreement connecting up her city like a Tube map. The Sheaf wasn’t on it at all. Too far from Tom’s trendy, shoebox flat. The Sheaf peered down at semis and unkempt gardens, suburban cats fucking and fighting behind the dustbins.

  Her pocket was vibrating again.

  I’ve got an hour, maybe 2. Come round. X

  People said jealousy was green, like sickness. But for Leigh it was better than that. Sometimes, jealousy was a spur. It woke her up at 5 a.m. It stopped her from lying in bed those days when the curtains couldn’t be thick enough, when she wanted to switch the sun off. It made her body shake with anger. And anger was a kind of movement. If you knew how to control it, anger could help you do anything. It could help you sink your fingers into every crimp on a climb so hard they had to hold. It could help you reach higher and hold on.

  She downed her pint and swung herself off the bar stool, swaying towards the toilets. And there they were, in her peripheral vision, huddled round a table too small for them. Caron caught her eye, but the others – two blokes nursing glasses of water – didn’t notice, and she was glad as she slid down next to them. When she spoke, there was something unnaturally and briefly still about Caron. As if what she was saying pivoted around her, left her in the eye of it, calm for once.

  ‘I know what you’re going to say, Leyton.’

  Leyton didn’t look like he’d ever known what he was going to say. He was wearing a grey cap and Leigh could see the silvery stubble of his hair underneath.

  ‘But it’s all about being strong for your weight. Your size.’

  The whisky was behind Leigh’s cheekbones and eyelids, making her whole face heavy.

  ‘You’re right fucking strong.’ The gap-toothed guy who wasn’t Leyton stuffed his folded beermat into a pocket. Leigh noticed how his down jacket was botched with tape. He had a wiry face and a wirier beard, newspaper-print black. There was something languid about him, but his eyes were too big and too green for his face.

  ‘Not as strong as I will be.’ She punched Leyton on the arm, exaggerated. ‘Sorry Leigh, I’m shit at introductions. Guys, this is my friend Leigh. Leigh, this is Leyton and Matt. Matt’s just got back from Kalymnos. Leyton’s just got back from the jobcentre.’

  She couldn’t quite work out how Caron knew the two men; if they were climbing acquaintances or something else. Leyton seemed awkward around Caron at times, touching her arm stiffly when he went to get a round in. It didn’t matter. As the night rolled round the pub, they both started to look the same to Leigh. Her phone kept buzzing. She had another whisky. Only Caron was utterly herself, still at the heart of The Sheaf.

  * * *

  When Leigh woke she was in the quarry, by the debris of a fire. She stared past Caron to the reddish flank of London Wall, almost blank but for those big zigzags and cracks dividing it. She thought if she looked at the wall long enough, everything that happened last night might happen again on it, like TV. Someone deciding to drive, Matt maybe. The moors like the sea at night on either side of the car. Caron taking her hand in the dark on the way from the lay-by, folding it into her own pocket, making her feel like a kid. The lighters in the blackness, the ends of Leyton’s roll-ups glowing. Someone pretending they could point out the constellations. The Bear. Orion’s Belt. The Great Twat in the Sky. And Leigh not wondering where the next drink was coming from, just huddling down in the darkness with Caron. Caron resting her chin on her shoulder, so she could feel the engine of her breath. Then the parts she imagined afterwards. A tongue, warmer than anyone else’s. And the heat inside her body. The heat that seemed to stay on Leigh, on her fingers and lips when she closed her eyes, then opened them and let the night sky in.

  Without waking anyone, Leigh inched herself away. She was still wearing all her clothes, but she’d taken her trail shoes off, as if she was getting into bed, so she yanked them on and stood up, shaky. Took a few steps backwards, still looking up at London Wall. Leyton and Matt were off to the left, sleeping like Yin and Yang. Leyton had his cap over his face.
/>   She dragged her hangover to Surprise View, then changed her mind and doubled back towards Higgar Tor. The ground was dry, but she felt like she was wading through mud, all the way, the bracken dragging at her legs. It was early, but already there was a woman picking her way up to the rocks with a tiny child clinging to each of her arms, like a human seesaw. Both of the kids were in crimson duffel coats and lumpy bobble hats.

  ‘When can we have an ice cream?’

  ‘It’s too early for an ice cream, Jack!’

  Leigh couldn’t look at them, because they made her think of teenage Sunday walks with her mad cousins. So many, she couldn’t remember their names. She had nothing in common with her family, but walks meant you didn’t have to talk to people, or not in the way you did normally anyway. You could say things without looking at them and it was easier. She didn’t know the names of the places back then – Higgar East, Carl Wark – but somehow, it was better not knowing. Once, they startled a tiny grouse chick from the grass and it ran alongside them for half a mile, before it threaded back into the undergrowth. Her cousins were all doctors and solicitors now, living in Birmingham and Manchester, married to people they’d met online or at work, waking up in flats that overlooked a long stretch of canal, a gentrified warehouse-turned-artisan-bakery.

  ‘But I want a Mister Whippy!’

  As Leigh passed them, she tried to soften her face into a smile. She nodded at the mother. One of the small boys hid.

  At the top of Higgar Tor, she carried on – round the weird elbow of Burbage North, the car park at the crook of it. Down towards the comforting loudness of the stream, where she crossed and kicked her shoes off underneath Triangle Buttress and started upwards, following the shiny holds and signatures of chalk. Bare feet were useless, but she knew the routes so well she could just hang on her arms. She realised she was climbing almost silently, holding her breath. It was as if she still didn’t want to wake up Caron. Caron, miles away.

  A bird swooped down from over the top. Leigh was thinking about High Tor above Matlock, how it was used as a suicide spot. How, if you were unlucky, someone might drive their car off the edge or jump while you were climbing. She never went there late, as if something about the morning might keep the place safe. Then Pete told her about the bloke who was belaying there when his mate, reaching the top of a climb, knocked down a huge block of rock. Took the bloke’s head off. Clean. She stopped climbing there after that. She wanted to laugh at herself for remembering it now. Morbid fucker, Pete would say. You don’t have to dwell on it. She stopped thinking and she started to climb.

  Harpur Hill

  You’ve been standing in my shadow for ten long minutes, fiddling with your harness, strapping on your new Velcro shoes. You can hear the lads racing on their quad bikes, down there at my feet in the mud and spoil heaps. They’re closer to me than you are. Closer to my core: the disused railway line; the caustic, turquoise pool; the industrial estate where those lost, metallic voices drift up to you from the tannoy. They’re closer to the council houses near Buxton, the dark green of the Pennine Moors, the place where I start, hunkering down in the valley like a neglected grandparent. You’re a stranger here, chalking up, pressing your fingers into the white powder you keep in a bag at your waist, then touching my quarried face, glancing up at the bolts they stapled into me. My skin is crumbling, punched metallic. I’m wondering what you and the old man belaying you have in common. Neither of you talks much. He’s old enough to be your father, but you don’t look alike. You fall at the third bolt and have to retrace the moves. When you get to the top, short of breath, he says You could be good if you tried.

  Leigh

  The abandoned jeep was smack in the middle of Burbage Brook lay-by, sagging into the mud. It was Thursday, Leigh’s day off, but she’d lost track of the weeks lately. The frame was mostly black from the flames and the windows gaped where the heat had exploded them. Inside, it was full of rubbish bags: cans of Carling poking out, some kind of rusted wire wrapped around the steering wheel and bags. Something intestinal about it. It bothered Leigh in a way it didn’t bother Caron. She was tense, as if they were going to get caught looking.

  ‘Kids,’ Caron laughed.

  Leigh was imagining the night before it happened. Too many of them crammed in the back seat. The bends at Fox House taken so fast the jeep nearly tipped over. Laughter. Then the lot of them hunched over tinnies, passing a single joint back and forth. One not knowing how to light it when it went out. Burbage South utterly black above them, just the moon there, like a gatecrasher. Caron was ahead of her already, starting up the path. She glanced back.

  ‘Leigh. Come on. It’s not a museum.’

  Leigh ran to catch up. They set off up the fawny track, bracken on either side. Leigh didn’t look over her shoulder.

  * * *

  Apparent North. It had to be. She’d known it the moment they got off the bus, even though Caron hadn’t said anything to her the whole journey, just smiled at her and squeezed her arm as the Sheffield suburbs got too big for themselves and then shrank again, back into the moorland and tracks they must have come from. They were here to scope out a route. Realising, she felt more like an accomplice than whatever she’d thought she was on the bus.

  Apparent North was small and cut-off. Like Caron. It was also dangerous in the rain.

  There were two short lads bouldering, one high on a rib, the other using his mat as a makeshift sofa, squinting up at his mate. He was shouting advice, but there was something detached in his voice, as if he didn’t care if he made it or not.

  ‘You got it, Jonno. Nice.’

  They passed them, heading for a buttress that looked like a warped battleship. A titanic piece of rock with a jutting overhang. Caron chucked down her bag and grinned.

  ‘Black Car Burning.’

  ‘I know.’

  Bouldering-mat boy had followed them and was looking up at the route, too.

  ‘You going for it?’ he asked. His voice was as big as his stare.

  ‘Not today.’

  Leigh could see him eyeing Caron, from her small feet to the large blue bobble hat she seemed to have tried to stuff her whole body into, like a sleeping bag in its sack. Today, she was 90 per cent hat. Bouldering-mat boy’s look was abrasive.

  ‘Are you the girl from that film? True Grit 3?’

  Caron snorted. She was underneath Black Car Burning, on her tiptoes, miming out moves. Even the first break was high. It was the kind of route that seemed to glare down at you, wherever you stood. That was the way Leigh often thought of Tom’s face. No matter where she went, she had this image of him, head downturned, craning towards her. She’d think he could see her whatever she was doing. It was better than thinking of him not thinking of her, him in the car with his girlfriend, or lecturing to a room of girls who thought he knew everything.

  ‘You must be confusing me with someone good.’

  Bouldering-mat was animated now, lit by his own ambition.

  ‘Have you ever climbed Downhill Racer?’

  Caron nodded. Leigh let the names wash over her like music.

  ‘Committed?’

  Caron cracked a smile. ‘Not yet. Might be committed soon. If I’m not careful.’

  He didn’t get the joke. He was off again, tripping over his words.

  ‘How about Malham? I want to climb there. Consenting Adults? Obsession?’

  ‘Not if I can help it.’

  ‘Psycho at Caley?’

  ‘I’m more Psycho in Sheffield.’

  ‘I’m at Sheffield, too. At the uni. I came for the climbing. It’s Freshers’ Week, but me and Jonno have been up here every day. We’re new to grit, just doing some easy stuff. E2s.’

  Easy stuff. Leigh could feel her body stiffening. She was used to this from the shop. People who had to position themselves, gauge how much better than you they might be. She’d had that stamped out of her at school. If she ever had it. The playground round the back of the leisure centre where she’d first
thought of climbing, up and over the meshed fence, slipping in and hiding with all the people in tracksuits and people with wet hair from swimming. The playground where you learned to underestimate yourself in company.

  ‘What’s your name?’ asked Bouldering-mat.

  ‘Caron,’ said Caron. Leigh said nothing.

  ‘I’m Greg. Greg Sutcliffe.’ He lurched his hand out.

  Caron didn’t take it. Leigh could tell she was impatient to be in her own world, fed up of even her own company, needing to lose herself in the guessed sequences of Black Car Burning, the thought of everything she might yet do.

  There was a thump as Jonno sailed through the air and landed on one of his bouldering mats. Greg didn’t even glance over.

  * * *

  Later, when the rain began to mesh over the valley, they walked along to Robin Hood’s Cave and sheltered under the lip of it. The cave smelled faintly of piss. Someone must have slept in it recently. There were acrid logs and a couple of empty cans.

  Caron was fingering the graffiti on a far wall, letters bigger than her hand.

  ‘My name’s in here somewhere. See if you can find it.’

  Leigh had always wanted to bring Tom to a place like this. She’d thought they’d forget the city, drinking whisky and watching the lights go out over Hathersage, one by one like faulty, flat-pack stars. Maybe the cave and the night would give him the feeling he could be anywhere, give him the nerve not to go back home. Now, with the piss smell and litter, she realised it was just another outpost of Sheffield. A fistful of town, brought and left here. They couldn’t even have fucked in the cave, it was too narrow and angular and dusty. It let too much light in.