Border Princes

ELEVEN

Butetown, the old heart of industrial Cardiff, used to run right down to the Docks. It still did, in the opinion of dyed-in-the-wool locals.

But Cardiff was post-industrial now. Chimney soot and coal ash from the steel works no longer occluded the midday sun. Smutty trains no longer clanked in and out along the Taff Vale line. After three billion pounds-worth of facelift, the Docks were no longer called the Docks. They were the Bay, gleaming new and millennial, where suits lunched, and bistros thrived, and a few hundred thousand bought you a penthouse in the Quay developments with views of the Barrage. Those stalwart locals still called it Butetown, though, fighting the onset of a change already done and dusted.

All that remained of Butetown, all that actually perpetuated the name, had coiled up in the heart of the central area and laid down in surrender, a sprawl of brick link tenements and fatigued 1950s high-rises, criss-crossed by the ghost veins of railway embankments, rendered in decaying Victorian stonework.

Shiny black, brooking no objections, the SUV chased up Angelina Street like a slipped greyhound. Terraces swept by, a mosque. Traffic on the road, a street market, shop fronts with battered shutters still closed at mid morning on a Tuesday, like knights in the lists with their visors shut for the tilt.

‘Chapel?’ asked Toshiko for the seventh time.

‘Patience. We’re getting there,’ said Jack.

He turned off into Skean Street, then braked as a refuse lorry blocked the way. He turned his head, resting his left arm across the seat backs, and reversed as far as Livermore, then switched left and then right again. Cobbles bumbled under their tyres.

He drove them down a narrow gulf between old machine shops, and swung out wide in the gravel bed of a dead lot. Fossil cars, up on bricks, gazed at them with rusted eyes.

‘Here?’ asked Toshiko.

Jack pulled the handbrake. ‘Here. What have you got for me?’

She shrugged, and leaned forward, punching up the dashboard displays, working between one body of data and the next with the trackball set into the dash.

‘Nothing?’ she suggested.

‘Go on.’

‘An absence of fact. A lack of data. What do you want me to say?’

‘Exactly that,’ Jack said. ‘There’s nothing here.’

‘So why…?’

‘Nothing at all. You see?’

‘Uh, no?’

‘Not even bricks and ground,’ Jack said softly.

‘Ah,’ said Toshiko. ‘I see now. Hang on. No, I don’t.’

‘Let’s take a walk,’ said Jack.

He got out. She followed him. The slam of her door sent pigeons mobbing up into the rafters of a nearby ruin. The air was wet, suffused with a mineral scent. Bird lime spattered the ground. The overarching iron rafters were black against the plain white sky. They looked like the ribs of a leviathan fish.

Jack popped the SUV’s back hatch. He took a compact scanner out of the equipment boxes and tossed it to her. Toshiko caught it neatly.

‘And this is for?’

‘Keeping tabs on the nothing that still isn’t there.’

Toshiko switched the scanner on. No reading, no bounce, no tone lock.

‘You know why I love working with you, Jack?’ she asked.

‘No?’

‘Me neither. I was hoping you could help me out with that.’

‘Come on,’ he said.

They crossed the weed-infested gravel, and crunched onto a slurry of tiles that had cascaded down from the roof at some point. Cobwebs strung between bent girders encrusted with twinkling dew diamonds from the night’s onslaught. They walked into shadow under what remained of a warehouse roof.

‘What are we looking for?’ Toshiko complained.

‘All in good time. Try appreciating the vernacular architecture,’ Jack said, his voice coming back hollow and echoing. ‘This was the Millner and Peabody Number Three Coal Depot. In 1851 alone, this place factored and then sent out eighteen million tons of coke to fuel the engines of Empire. Doesn’t that just make you crazy?’

‘The quantity?’

‘No, Tosh, coal. Like that was ever going to work in any lasting way.’

‘Right. I’m still getting nothing,’ Toshiko called, trying to reset her scanner.

‘Nothing? That’s good. That’s what we want.’

She ran to catch up with him. Loose stones scattered under her boots.

‘Through here,’ he said, leading her out of a crumbling doorway into another bare tract.

A little church sat in front of them, derelict, windows and doors boarded up, graffiti wound around its flanks. It was sitting inside the plot of the warehouse.

‘St Mary-in-the-Dust,’ said Jack, pleased with himself.

‘St Mary in the what?’

‘It was built in 1803 and demolished in 1840 to make way for the depots.’

‘But-’

‘I hadn’t finished-’

‘I hadn’t started. Demolished in 1840? But there it is.’

‘Exactly. It keeps coming back, once every thirty-five or thirty-nine years.’

‘It… what?’

‘We can count ourselves lucky. It wasn’t due back until 2011.’

‘Again, what?’

‘Come on,’ Jack said. He drew his revolver out from under his coat.

‘Oh, now I’m reassured,’ said Toshiko.

Davey got off the bus as it came to a stop.

‘Cheerio,’ he said to the driver.

The driver ignored him.

Davey limped up the street, the three books he’d borrowed from the lending library swinging in a string bag. It was going to rain again. He could feel it in his water.

He wondered where the cat had got to.

He hobbled up to his front door and searched for his key.

‘It’s Taff! It’s Taffy!’ a voice cried.

Where was his key? Under his glasses case, deep in his pocket. He rummaged.

‘Taff! Catch the ball, Taffy! Go on, catch it!’

‘Go away!’ he called, not looking around.

The boys were gathering. The yobbos. Ozzie and his mates. Bored and looking for a laugh. He could hear them. He could smell them: beer and weed. Yes, he bloody did know what weed was. He was old. He wasn’t stupid.

‘Taffy, Taffy, give us a song!’ they chanted.

‘Go away!’

Finally, finally, he got his key out and into the lock. He turned the key. The door stuck sometimes in wet weather. He had to push it.

Something hit him in the back of the head, hard. It hit him so hard, it slammed his face into the door.

Davey Morgan fell down. He flopped back against the door of his house, his own bloody house, and sagged, feeling the warm drip coming out of his nose.

‘You bloody bastards,’ he whispered.

On the path in front of him, a ball bounced to rest. Thunt-thunt-thunt.

They’d thrown it at him, thrown it at his head.

Bastards.

He looked up. The yobbos had gathered on the pavement, crowing and laughing, pointing and whooping. Ozzie and the other man-boys. Stupid haircuts, stupid skinny faces, stupid clothes, trousers that didn’t pull up past their hips and left a waistband of underpants on show.

‘You bloody bastards!’ he spat.

‘Oooh, Taffy! Such strong friggin’ language!’ Ozzie shouted.

‘Mess him up! Mess him up!’ the others sang. Scrawny boys. Scrawny bloody bastards.

Ozzie gathered up the ball in his hands and tossed it over and over. ‘One on one, eh, Taffy? You and me? One on one?’

‘Go to hell, boy,’ Davey said, picking himself up.

The ball walloped him in the face. As he fell down again, his swollen knee shooting pain up his thigh, all he heard was wild, mocking laughter. They’d broken his nose. His cheek too, it felt like. Bloody, bloody bastards.

Davey blinked away tears. Ozzie was picking up the bouncing ball again.

‘Want another go, you old git?’ he asked.

Davey found an iota of strength from somewhere and hoisted himself up. He leant on the door and turned the key. As the door swung open and carried him in, he felt the ball ricochet of his back. More laughter.

The umbrella stand lived just inside the door, exactly where it had stood since Glynis had put it there in 1951. It held his old black brolly, her neat beige collapsible, a walking stick.

Davey Morgan reached for none of those. He took hold of the other object leaning innocuously in the stand.

Upright, he turned in the doorway.

‘One on one, eh, Taffy?’ Ozzie called, bouncing the ball. His chorus of bastards whinnied and shrieked.

‘Go on, then, you bloody bastard,’ Davey said.

Ozzie chucked the ball at him.

It struck Davey and somehow, miraculously, stayed put on his hand. The yobbos fell silent for a second, puzzled.

With a slow fart, the ball deflated. Davey Morgan slid it off the blade and let it paff! on the ground.

Army-issue Bayonet No. 1. A little dulled with age, like him, but still seventeen bloody inches long and sharp as a bugger. Like a bloody sword, it was, the size of it.

Davey raised it. The yobbos gawped.

‘Bugger off, you tossers, or I’ll do you up a treat!’ he declared, brandishing the blade.

They looked on. They stared. They fled like a bunch of nancies down the street, scattering in all directions.

Davey picked up his string bag of books and went indoors. He put the bayonet back in the umbrella stand, and locked the door behind him.

He made himself a cup of tea. There was still no sign of the cat. The bowl of food had been left uneaten.

He sat down with the three books he’d borrowed. Each one was an illustrated volume on modern sculpture. He was sure he’d seen the thing in the shed, or something like it, before. Glynis had loved sculpture. They’d once gone all the way to Bath, to see a modern art show. 1969. He’d gone along with it because he had loved to see her happy.

It had meant nothing to him then. It meant something to him now. He flicked through the pages, stopping at various images: Brancuzzi, Epstein, Giacometti. That’s what he had seen. Lean, attenuated bodies made of metal; cramped, pigeon-chested torsos; flaring slipstream limbs; burnished, angular heads.

But not still. Moving.

Humming.

Walking.

Gwen pulled the Saab into the dead lot. They could both see the SUV parked ahead of them.

They got out.

Gwen looked around. James fitted his Bluetooth.

‘Jack? Tosh? Hello?’

He paused, listening. His expression had turned sour.

‘What is it?’ Gwen asked.

‘Jack says boiled egg,’ said James.

They started to run.