1
The best of the heat had
gone out of the day but the terraced street was luminous with late summer
light. They piled out of Pauly’s double
decker, still finding sand in their eyebrows and behind their ears. Maeve was slowed down, as he tried to
disembark, by a little kid, bug-eyed with sleep, easing himself down onto the
road with all the care of a drunk.
Dumpy Rita followed Maeve to his silver Fiesta and sat in the passenger
seat and babbled to him about something that was important to her while he
spent a full ten minutes correcting its parking. The window was rolled down and the sunroof open but the air
didn’t stir. He watched Pauly fussing
over his bus. Now the passengers had
dispersed Pauly loitered around in its doors as if it were a street
corner. Half a filterless cigarette
poked from between his lips. It never
went out. He never had to light a new
one. Occasionally he’d pincer it
between two fingertips and a thumb tip, pull it out and wave it expressively,
ejecting banter at passing street dwellers.
When he ate, or slept, he simply set it to one side. It would be there waiting for him when he
was ready, his fire hazard dæmon. He
had slicked-back black hair and he was wearing a white vest. His moustache was of the pencil variety and
he always talked in what he thought was an imitation Brooklyn accent. He said it was a medical condition.
When
Rita ran crying from the car, across the street, and banged on the door of her
house (even though she had a key of her own) Pauly pulled the cig from his
mouth and took two steps forward out from the shade of the bus.
“Hey,
Rita! Rumpty dumty Rita! Hey, what’s da madda? What’s da madda?”
Rita’s
mum opened the door to her distressed daughter who collapsed into her
bewildered arms. “Hey, don’t you worry,
Mrs Malone,” barked Pauly. “I’ll get to
da boddam of dis.” Maeve observed
passively from his rolled down window, elbow hanging out. Pauly fixed him with a fierce stare. “Maeve, what’ve ya done? Eh?
What’ve ya done now?”
Maeve
plumped out his bottom lip and shrugged.
“Nothing.”
“Whaddya
mean ‘nut’n’? Ya godda be kiddin’ me or
sumpt’n!”
Mrs
Malone was herding Rita inside and rolling her eyes. “Don’t you worry, Mrs Malone,” yelled Pauly as the door swung
shut. “I’ll get to da boddam of
dis.” The door slammed and he turned
back to Maeve with raised eyebrows.
“Hey,” he said. “Whaddya gonna
do?”
He
backed into the doorway of his bus, leaned on one shoulder and squinted out
across the Street, keeping guard over the order of things. “You know what your problem is, Maeve?” He looked at Maeve through screwed up eyes.
After several moments Maeve realised it wasn’t a rhetorical question.
“No.”
Pauly sucked on his everlasting cig like it was a sweet, and he frowned. He’d been getting edgy lately.
“Nah. I didn’t tink so.”
This was Pauly. He was thirty-four years old. His twin brother, Gumbo, was twenty-four.
The terraced street was cobbled. The town was half Salford, tucked safely behind its dock wall in the seventies and eighties, and half Swansea in the new millennium, reclining beside its wide bay, and it was called Cylinder City. In this particular heartbeat of the scintillating eternal moment Maeve finds that he is a pale, distracted young man who is sometimes fourteen and sometimes twenty four and sometimes thirty three, never in any particular order.
At this point he continues to sit in his car gazing at nothing, and in the film version the camera pulls back, rising up above the street, but looking down, while the soundtrack is taken over by Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn singing Nothing Without You. The opening titles run over visuals of Northern people doing what it is they do when it’s late summer and the sun is out.
1
Music fades.
Down in his car Maeve sat for forty-two minutes while the shadow of the
garage wall reached across the cobbles to the far side of the street and began
to inch up the houses. A grubby pair of
kids, a girl and a boy, worked their way along the edge of the pavement armed
with lollipop sticks, lancing the pitch bubbles at the side of the road before
they hardened. The girl had a dark
round scab like a two pence piece on each knee. The sole was coming loose from one of the boy’s pumps; it slapped
and flopped when he walked, like the tongue of a delirious dog.
Maeve watched absently. The day
hung. A breeze slipped through the
rolled down window, bringing the scent of homemade chips from some lucky
family’s open door. A radio is
playing. Steve Harley is singing
something about tumbling down. Maeve
becomes aware of a boy standing on the corner watching him. He’s about ten, pale-faced, almond-eyed,
tousle-haired, stubborn-chinned. He’s
wearing flares and a snake belt and a close fitting, long sleeved T-shirt
banded in thin yellow and brown stripes.
He’s standing very straight, heels lifting off the ground, unsure if
he’s seeing what he thinks he is.
Maeve sighs and wrinkles his nose unhappily: he knows what’s
coming. He starts the engine.
The boy’s voice comes to him, small and uncertain.
“Adrian?”
Maeve always finds this unsettling.
He pulls out and drives to the end of the street, studiously avoiding
eye contact.
“Adrian,” says the boy. It’s
not a question this time. Maeve ignores
him and eases the car out onto Dockwall Road, aware that the boy isn’t moving,
except to turn on the spot. “Adrian.” His voice doesn’t raise, but it follows
Maeve forlornly as he drives away. He
still hears it as he passes the school, winds through the business units, picks
up speed along Trafford Road, floats over the swing bridge, through the blur of
anonymous roads and streets that always lead him to Penbroke Park and down to
the sea.
“Adrian.”
