Seeing the Wires

I didn’t ask Jack what the joke was. His jokes were the sort Bernard Manning would have turned down as too offensive. ‘So how is the printing trade? Any interesting gossip from our local reporters?’

‘Someone’s filling the mines with stuff. Banned toxic stuff so horrible you couldn’t even offload it in fucking Guatemala, and someone’s lobbing it under Dudley. The hospital’s sinking into the ground. Teenage literacy is down, teenage pregnancies are up, and teenagers should be seen and not fucking heard.’

‘The usual, then,’ I said. Jack nodded his head in agreement.

‘I saw Eddie Finch the other week,’ he said.

‘Oh?’

‘Said he’d be in for a drink later. If nothing came up. He has to man the phones in case a story breaks. Pensioner loses cat, cat loses sense of direction, man paying by cheque is killed by everyone else in the supermarket. It must be all fucking go, working on the Herald.’

Eddie Finch worked on the Pensnett Herald, which covered the events in Pensnett. Pensnett was a stretch of road outside Dudley with three shops and a bad reputation. I’d never been there myself, but I knew someone who’d stopped for a newspaper and escaped with stitches and a persistent nervous twitch and was told he was lucky. There was a fun run there once a year, which was like the London Marathon only you ran a lot faster. The Herald was always full of crime reports and obituaries. Like the notices in the local shop windows, it suffered from displaced apostrophes. Eddie covered some of the reporting, most of the horoscopes and all of the frequent letters from ‘Angry of Kingswinford’. He was a minor reporter on a minuscule newspaper. He drank, however, as though he was auditioning for a place in Fleet Street before Fleet Street moved out of Fleet Street. From time to time he’d join us for a drink. Though I didn’t often drink much, if Eddie joined us, I would drink more. More than I could cope with, usually. Then I’d wake up dizzy and lost with a glutinous headache and vague memories of appalling things that, it would turn out, I had done.

‘He said he’d be in by nine,’ said Jack, checking his watch.

‘Is he?’

‘Not unless this is bolloxed. Probably just as well if he doesn’t come in. Lisa doesn’t like him much.’

‘Because he drinks?’

‘Because he’s a journalist. She doesn’t trust them. She says everything you tell them goes in the papers.’

‘I’ve told him lots of things and he hasn’t put any of them in the paper.’

‘You don’t have anything worth printing. Not these days. I think we could have kept him in material when we were young.’

‘I don’t know. Anyway, Lisa’s right. I don’t trust Eddie. Not when he’s drunk.’

‘He’s always fucking drunk.’

‘There you are then.’

I wasn’t sure where I was. The conversation kept heading off somewhere, then turning back before it got there. Jack was on his way to another subject. Perhaps he wanted to talk about Lisa. He usually did. She was his girlfriend. They had met at some sort of convention for body-piercing aficionados. It had been held at Stourbridge town hall. The two of them had noticed each other across a room full of pinned flesh. Chromed instruments curved out of the crowd; by the light of surgical lamps they started to chat, and snapped together like a ring binder. They had met again a day or two later and one thing had led to one more thing. One more thing had gone on for a month, and then Lisa moved in with Jack and Jack decorated several rooms.

It all sounded serious to me. I fell head over heels all the time, but I’d never done any decorating. I watched decorating on the television while I was waiting for a real programme to come on. Decorating happened at a stage of a relationship that I had either missed or never reached. I thought that it would probably be the latter. I could start relationships, but I wasn’t very good at them. It was like starting fights after a few drinks. It made sense at the time, but you ended up with a headache and no money and all of your mates wishing you’d shut up about it.

I hadn’t met Lisa. Jack said she was wonderful, but I wasn’t going to take his word for anything. He was hardly going to say she was an old boiler with a bosom full of rivets. That’s not the sort of thing you say in the first couple of months. If you get through the first six months you can say anything you like. I think. I’ve never got past four.

I must have been picking the wrong girls.

Jack was happy with Lisa. I knew this because he kept telling me so. He told me so more often than I wanted him to, and after he’d had a few more drinks he’d tell me about it non-stop.

He had a few more drinks.

‘She’s lovely,’ he said, ‘she’s a peach. You hear that? She’s a peach.’

‘Round and hairy?’ I asked.

‘None of yours,’ he said, ‘as it happens. None of your business. She’s wonderful. I don’t know what she’s doing with me.’

‘Perhaps she got one of her rings caught in one of yours. What are you going to do? Is there room between the tattoos to fit her name in? Or is it just going to be her initials?’

Jack went several shades darker. ‘That’s you, isn’t it? Always having a go. You’ve never got this far. Know why? Because you’d rather be out there taking the piss. Have you ever been in love?’

‘Yes,’ I said, truthfully. I was forever falling in love. It was easy; like falling off a bike. I was in love right then. I was going steady with a girl, as it happened.

I’ll tell you about her later.

‘Well then,’ he said, ‘well then. This is real. Lisa is different. This is different.’

‘They’re all different. You said that Jo Branigan and Andrea Horton were different. You thought both of them were different at the same time, for a week. Then you decided they were actually the same.’

‘Lisa is different differently.’

He looked at me helplessly, drunk and infatuated.

‘It’s the same,’ I said, not knowing why I was pushing him. It was instinctive. It was easier than falling off a bike.

‘This is different,’ he insisted.

‘Oh yes, you work in a printers so naturally you know more about anything than I do, I’m just the one who went to university.’

‘What do you know about? Books. You wouldn’t know the real world if it smacked you in the face.’

‘If I smacked you in the face you’d know about it.’

I wasn’t sure how the conversation had turned nasty. Beer, probably.

‘How about if you murdered me?’ asked Jack, leaning into the conversation. ‘You’re the history man. You know why? Because you don’t want to remember your own history. You want to go back before that. You want other people’s memories. I remember everything.’ He rolled back his sleeve; swirls and spirals ran up his arm, between swellings and scabs. ‘Look at this,’ he said, ‘I’m receptive. You with me? I’m receptive.’

‘Receptive to hepatitis B, septicaemia, traffic reports …’

That calmed him down. ‘Have it your way then,’ he said. ‘How’s the niece?’

‘Haven’t seen her since I went to university.’

‘Typical student. How old is she now then? Three, four?’

‘Four.’

‘You know she’s never met her Uncle Jack?’

I did know that. I liked it that way.

‘I’ll tell you what, I’m not doing anything Saturday. We’ll pop round and see her. And your brother, we don’t see him much now.’

‘We fell out. Family things.’