Hemispheres Read Free Page B

melted. Even now,
     sheared and bagged off his head with lighter fluid on his breath and pupils the size of dinnerplates.
    Rain began to whirl out of a sky which was bulging and thickening like a varicose vein. Icy drops swarmed over Paul’s rosy,
     shorn head.
    You’ve been through that lass, then. The Paki one.
    Raz?
    Aye. Carlo said.
    She’s Bangladeshi. I go there to do homework. Can’t get any space in the pub with Hagan and all them.
    Homework, he erupted, with a barking laugh. Shook his head. We crossed over these little stumpy streets of terraces, fifty
     yards of houses and then Back Saltholme. Half of them were empty and the council had cages on the windows.
    That Gary Hagan, said Paul. One of these days he’ll get his napper tapped off.
    Our feet tramping in the wet, the huge metal sheds of Swan Hunter looming ahead.
    Has he nailed yer mam yet?
    Kate? He wants to. I don’t reckon she’s having it, mind.
    She keeps him hanging round, though, eh?
    She likes having a man behind the bar.
    I’ve seen her looking, he said. She wants me.
    Fuck off.
    A bus shimmied past us, headlights rippling like moonlight on the wet road. We swerved to avoid the spray.
    I might fit her in me busy schedule, leered Paul. One of these days.
    Go on then, I said. You’re going to tell me anyway.
    Paul’s Munchausen sexual adventures. I assumed they were fiction, I half feared they were true.
    Well, he said. There’s this one. Hazel, from Pally Park. Went through seventeen squaddies in one go, what I heard. Me and
     Dog were up there the other night, panelling fuck out of it, one end each. Get yourself down with us sometime, you could squirt
     your beans in there as well.
    There was a pause while I considered this tempting invitation. We were nearly at the bus stop.
    I’m on the bus, I said. I hoped he wouldn’t come along.
    On the bus. There’s cigarette smoke lazing through a shaft of sunlight and you lean your head on the window and the rattle
     of the diesel makes your thoughts dance away on a tide of vibration. Reclaimed fields on the estuary, unearthly green where
     the spring grass is beginning to stir, and below them the black earth and ballast and the alluvium of the old estuary in volume
     on volume like the pages of a damp book. A pair of teal rise on stiff wings and the air thrums in their tailfeathers and they
     fly for the shelter of a pair of cooling towers where steam blossoms high above the rim.
    I called Jonah my uncle but he was just a mate of Yan’s, back to when Noah was a lad. We went birding together, now and then,
     buthis heart wasn’t in it. He did it because it kept us in touch, and because of Yan. Like there was a thread he had to keep
     spinning.
    Yan and me did the circuit two or three times a week, when he wasn’t on base or on a tour. Haverton Hole, Saltholme and Back
     Saltholme and the Triangle, Dorman’s and Reclamation, Greatham Creek and Calor Gas and Seal Sands and the Long Drag. Plus
     we turned out when a real crippler came in.
    It’s got to be some of the best birding in the country – one of the few consolations for living in this shitheap, said Yan.
     Maybe that’s why he did what he did. But I always liked it here, where the river runs out of energy and the pylons are stalking
     their prey across country and the refineries and petrochemical plants come to fruition in giant rock formations, in hard cliffs
     and crags above the reclaimed land. I like the Cleveland Hills making a bunched fist on the horizon, shafts of cold sunlight
     sweeping across their flanks, across the distant estates of Middlesbrough.
    I like hanging on by the fingernails. The honesty of it.
    It wasn’t the battery of telescopes you get for a real rarity, but a few of them at the edge of the dock with nowt better
     to do on a Saturday morning. I recognized a couple of the blokes and we nodded without speaking. I pulled my bins out and
     focused on the diver down there beyond the staithes, long and low and the