Hemispheres Read Free Page A

one of them micro-switches, you make a new connection.
     And maybe that’s enough to derail the future onto some inscrutable new track. Maybe that’s enough to send you to Uzbekistan.
     And maybe your old track – your old destiny – just shrivels up and dies right there and then and you never even know it was
     laid out ready for you.
    It was dark in the bar with stacks of chalky unwashed glasses, dead and wounded butts mounded up in the ashtrays. The sharp
     smell of stale beer like vomit, like kissing a girl with rancid breath. Hagan never cleared up after a stoppy-back.
    I gripped the receiver, one of them old bakelite things.
    Cape of Good Hope.
    A trickle of electrons rattled into the earpiece and came out as a familiar voice, the accent so thick it was almost Scouse.
    Now then daft cunt, it’s Jonah.
    Now then Uncle Jonah.
    I’d been half expecting him to ring today. Mark the anniversary somehow.
    Red-throated diver, he said. Hartlepool Fish Quay. Worth a gander?
    Aye. I’ll meet you down there. Do you know what day it is?
    He was silent for a moment. Gusts of static on the line.
    I know, he said.
    I fumbled for a tab and flipped the lighter, flame fluttering like a moth in the ugly darkness of the bar. Franco was over
     there, stretched out asleep on the fake leather bench under the window. Must have drawn the short straw and missed out on
     a bed. I walked over and looked down at him, knotty and pickled like a conker that’s been in vinegar, fading tats on the forearms
     and a little tache bobbing gently on his upper lip. He snuffled, tugging the leather jacket further over him, eyeballs swivelling
     in sleep behind the wrinkled lids. I sucked long and hard at the cigarette, extended it carefully above his face. I smiled
     at the thought. I was going to tap a gobbet of ash onto his eyelid, soft and bristling like a woolly bear caterpillar.
    But I didn’t. I let the ash fall on the floor and walked out into the morning.
    Haverton Hill was a ghost town, them days. Used to be a thriving little place round the shipyards on the Tees. Then they built
     the ICI at Billingham, right on the doorstep, the biggest chemical complex in Europe, and the pollution knackered Haverton.
     The people had to go, even though they were here first. So a few year before I was born they knocked most of it down, moved
     people onto estates further out.
    Now there was just the Cape, beached on its corner plot like a ship on a reef. And the railway bridge, a second-hand car lot
     and a scrapyard and an old gadge called Decko who lived in a caravan in the middle of his pigeon sheds. And further out were
     the pikeys with them thread-bare horses chained up in the fields around the Hole and then the saltmarsh and the sharp wind
     crackling with sea and impending rain.
    Along Port Clarence Road the hoardings groaned in the wind in front of the railway embankment. The River Tees over there,
     flat and brown, slipping quietly to the sea.
    Now then Danny charver, do us a ciggy.
    Paul lurched out of the bus shelter and fell into step with me.
    I’ve left the tabs at home marra.
    He started wheedling.
    Away, I’m fucking gasping here.
    I shrugged and we carried on and the tramp of his boots echoed from the pavement.
    Me and Paul were near enough the same age but you wouldn’t know it to look. He was half a head taller than me and grown into
     his muscles with a bonehead haircut that made him look like an Easter Island statue. He was fledged from rubble, from bramble
     and thorn, dragged up by his mam in one of the houses behind the Social Club. When we were at Port Clarence Primary he was
     the kid everyone was scared of, who got slippered for calling Mrs Reresby a saggy-titted old bitch and then just walked out
     of the gate and went home. He got away with murder cos he had these cool green eyes like unripe sloes and full raspberry lips
     and brown skin with a bloom behind it that made you want to touch. He just grinned at teachers and they