Be Near Me (15 page)

'Maybe I am,' I said. 'It's dark enough.'

My duties had shown me just about every street and cul-de-sac on the housing estate, and I must say the place chilled me. The fearful black and whiteness of everything was so overwhelming; the dead quietness of the squares in the afternoon, where cars were infrequent and dogs appeared sovereign in the alleys. Most of the houses were exactly the same, inside and outside, except for those which had been purchased from the council, an achievement often marked by a neon-coloured front door or a wall built round a garden of blue gravel. People lived and died on the estate without moving more than a few feet each day. The council planted shrubs that the children destroyed. There was nothing beautiful and nothing of human history on the estate, just an immoderate acceptance of life's low standards and a desire for state benefits and babies.

Mark seemed drunk and his tour past the playgrounds and the towers with their vandalised entry buzzers gave me a rather giddy feeling, a notion that I was living several lives at once. The chip shop was closed but the pavement outside smelled of vinegar and of curry sauce. We didn't see a single person, but the stars were bright. 'Mark,' I said, 'even when you're out by yourself around here, do you ever feel watched?'

He looked at me, his pupils large.

'No,' he said. 'There's nobody here.'

Under the railway bridge, there was a concrete bench popular with Mark and his friends; they used it as a place to smoke and hang out while watching the trains go past. There was a wall, and blackberry bushes crowded the verge between the wall and the tracks: the leaves were green but the dark fruit was some months away. 'It's great here,' said Mark. 'The best place in the world.'

'It smells of pee,' I said.

'Aye,' he said. 'People just take a slash here if they need to. Like, nobody's going home for a pee if you can just do one here and that's it done. It's awesome. Just standing here. It's quiet, intit?'

A cider bottle stood by the wall. Mark lifted it and poured some onto the ground and swiped a finger through the pouring liquid. 'Magic,' he said, putting the finger in his mouth. 'You have to watch out. Some ae the fuckers will jeest pee in the bottle.' He seemed to brighten and become higher under the bridge, dancing with the bottle as I tapped the iron girders with my umbrella.

He passed the cider. 'Have a few slugs of that,' he said.

I took the botde and drank from it, feeling for a while that we were not answerable to anyone but ourselves. A large drystone wall on the other side of the tracks was inhabited by starlings. I could see them begin to stir in the holes in the wall. Mark laughed and swayed beside me, the birds missing nothing, the time growing good with the taste of sweet cider in our mouths.

There was this perfect moment, I tell you, deep in the sapphire gloaming of the outgoing night, against the stone bench and under the bridge, when a goods train passed before us and we raised our voices and yelled like lunatics under the noise of the train. Nothing will stand in the way of that moment, when he looked over at me and laughed out loud and began shouting as the iron trucks scudded past in the gorge beneath the blackberry bushes. In the roar and blaze of his youth Mark was hardly a thing of sinew and cells, soft down and skin. Only his spirit was animal, and the very atmosphere was responsive to his presence, as if the air breathed him and not him the air. He lifted the empty cider bottle and threw it into the wheels of the train.

We emerged from the place under the bridge and walked the short distance to a line of shops that nestled in blue light under the high flats. Outside the pizza shop, the telephone boxes had been shattered, the nuggets of glass lying frosted and pretty on the ground. 'Who cares about phone boxes?' said Mark when I pointed down. 'Everybody's got mobiles.' He took me around the back of the shops and shimmied over the wall, where he opened the wooden gates and told me to keep my voice down.

'Steady on,' I said. 'What are you doing?'

'It's an empty pub,' he said. He slurred a little but was still lucid given how late it was and what he might already have taken. His eyes were shining. 'Used to be the Ardeer Arms. The windaes are boarded up but there's a padlock on the back door.' He took off one of his shoes and lifted out a key. There was a strange smell inside the place, a smell of rotten beer mats and some kind of emptiness. Wires sprang from a box in the corridor and he hit a switch and a dim light flickered on in the pub's interior, a panel of yellow above a gantry of dusty bottles. A bicycle was mounted haphazardly in one of the booths, and there was a traffic cone on an old snooker table, the pockets burst and the edges of the table stacked with cigarette butts.

Again and again, I wonder why I didn't talk to myself. Why did I not stop at the door and listen to my own counsel? It was as if my enjoyment of the situation and my fear of losing favour with Mark engulfed me, and I couldn't stop going forward, ignoring whatever scraps of wisdom were left to me in the twilight world of that strange year. Sometimes stopping to think is itself a way of stopping harm, and I can only say that I didn't have it in me to stop or to remember who I was at that moment.

'Why did the pub close?' I asked.

'Dealers,' he said. 'It used to be a busy pub. They had cabaret acts and stuff like that. Quiz nights. But the neds moved in, selling, like, not just drugs but hard drugs, then the brewery gave up.'

Mark lit a candle that was stuck in an empty bottle of Budweiser and we watched it throw shadows on the ceiling, which moved up there like the ghosts of past laughter. I sat down as he went from place to place in the long room, lifting things, clearing space on the tables. He behaved as if the abandoned pub was a starter flat and he was proud of his possessions, wishing the place to appear at its best. He said he came to the den quite a lot, a few of them did. Sometimes they came when they bunked off school. 'At night, though,' he said, 'it's usually just me on my own, and that's when I like it the best.' He lifted some darts from the bar and started throwing them at a lopsided board. 'My mum and dad used to come down here,' he said. 'Everybody on the estate came down.'

There was a small stage up the back, a fringe of sequins. A bottle of Martini Bianco stood inside a glass bingo cabinet.

'So it was busy?'

'Packed Friday and Saturday nights. It was, like, couples,' Mark said. 'Mainly married couples and all that shite. There's better pubs up the town. There were a few good stramashes in here. That guy who is married to your housekeeper, what's his name—Jack Poole. He once threw a full pint of Guinness into the fruit machine.'

'Right.'

Mark seemed thoughtful. 'I bought this myself,' he said, lifting up a Glade air freshener from the bar. Then he went over to the wall and switched on a two-bar fire.

'Do you like pubs?'

'I used to,' I said. 'When I was a student.'

'Were you clever at being a student?'

'Not especially.'

'Did you always get top marks?'

'I think I was more interested in pubs,' I said. As I said this I thought of St Giles and the glowing windows on cold nights when I'd walk back from the chapel at Blackfriars. 'One loses sight of pubs,' I said.

'Does one?' he said, and he smiled.

He cleaned the butts off the snooker table and found a half-bottle of vodka and washed it under the tap. He went off to find two clean glasses and I looked at his shoulders, his hair that curved sleekly into the nape of his neck, and I considered how nice a husband he might be for somebody some day, if that were possible, if the world were kind.

We walked into the estate and he showed me the window of his bedroom, the short distance from the window to the roof of the bin cupboard, which he scaled down—'dreeped,' he said—on the nights he wanted to escape the boredom of his bedclothes. 'I just wake up,' he said, 'and I think, I want to get out of here. I want to go down the railway or up the Cash & Carry.' He said he knew how to get into the front part of a storehouse up there, where they kept packs of Lucozade and things like that. And he said that recently he stole a whole box of lip balms, cherry-flavoured, his favourite kind, he said, and that even when he was in his bed sometimes and half asleep he would see the coloured bottles of Lucozade like a gold light in his head. 'That's why I like working at the petrol station,' he said. 'Open all night. You don't have to lie in bed just wasting your life.'

Mark's house, like all the houses, was clad with thousands of tiny white stones: he said the stones were grey now because of the rain but in the summer he used to pick them off, collect them in a football sock and use the sock as a weapon in pitched battles with young people from rival squares. He seemed happy describing these seasonal events, this world of his; it was hard for him to believe we sat in a place that was once a marshy field, so filled now with names and little stories and all the business of life. We sat in the middle of the square, under the umbrella, looking up at the strange blue darkness of his house.

'Keep your voice down,' he said.

'Is your father still not working?'

'Retired,' he said. 'He's a fat bastard.'

'Be kind, Mark. He gets depressed, doesn't he?'

'How do you know?'

'It's quite a small parish,' I said.

'He thought he had a job recently,' said Mark. 'He was para.'

'Paralytic?'

'No, stupid. Paranoid.'

'Right.'

'He thought he had a job. The people in the next square used to call him The Man Who Thought It Was Time for Work. He would come down early, like, every morning for ages and put on a pair of working boots and then go out in the front garden there. He was completely out of it. He would bring a shovel sometimes and start digging up the garden, saying, "The boys are picking me up in the van this morning. I'm getting a lift in.'"

'He thought he had a job to go to?'

'Aye. He was The Man Who Thought It Was Time for Work. He was off his face half the time, and depressed, that's right. This was only like a year ago or something. The fucker would stand in his boxers and that—those big tackety boots—talking shite about tea breaks and overtime and the van coming to pick him up.'

'That's very sad,' I said.

'I know,' said Mark. 'He's a sad fuck. He's been on the government cheese for years but still thinks he's a worker.'

'The dole?'

'Aye.'

'It's very upsetting, the idea of a man wanting to go to work.'

'You're a peach,' said Mark. 'He didnae really want to go to any work. You kiddin'? He wouldnae go to work if you paid him. Well, maybe if you paid him a lot. But he was jeest para. He's always been like that. Completely sparkled. At least he's got cable.'

'That's very sad.'

'He goes mental sometimes. The other week he buried the ironing board oot the back. My ma didnae know what was happening. He was oot there wi' that spade diggin' a hole in the garden for hours and he buried the ironing board and the drainin' thing off the sink and then filled the hole in wi' soil and sat on the back step rolling cigarettes. He's no' right in the head. I bet he wishes he'd never met my mother or me.'

The door of the rectory creaked as we came in and the night's journey paused for a second just beyond the porch. I put the umbrella against the wall. 'Any beer?' Mark said, walking across the sitting room.

'Just a second,' I said.

He pointed to a framed print of a caged blue parrot that hung above the bookcase. 'Cool bird,' he said. 'Green.'

'It's blue,' I said. 'Very old. Copied from a mosaic in the Basilica di San Clemente in Rome.'

'That's definitely green,' he said. 'I'm one person you don't have to explain green to. I know my green.'

'But it's blue, Mark. Very clearly blue. Cobalt, as a matter of fact. These old prints often have colours you just don't see any more. That's the glory of the print. You hardly ever see that blue anywhere.'

His pupils were black and glossy. 'You know I'm right,' he said. 'The bird is green.' Mark had a young person's disregard for the breakability of beautiful things. I could see it in the way he lifted and laid down the room's objects, the unsparing touch, and within minutes of coming in he almost tipped a vase in a bid to reach the stereo system. 'There's no beer, I'm afraid. It might have to be wine.'

'Any Cola?' he said. 'If you've got Cola we could mix it with the wine and get some Jesus Juice goin' in the house.'

'No,' I said. 'Just wine.'

'That'll do, then.'

I closed the curtains on the front windows. The morning was close and I didn't want to think about Mass just a few hours ahead with nothing prepared and my mind dull with drink. Yet I felt serene and unthreatened by events as I took a mouthful of wine and imagined the warmth of the sun through the soil of some Burgundy vineyard.

'This is all total crap,' he said. 'Have you no' got any music at all? Just these things by auld geezers wi' specs?'

'There's some geniuses in there,' I said.

'Some total loofahs, you mean.'

'You haven't heard them,' I said. 'Don't be a moron.'

Mark smiled over his shoulder as if humoured by a child's sudden audacity. He then twisted the radio dial through crackling worlds of inanity until he lit on a 'dance' station. 'Respect,' he said, then he drank the glass of wine in one go before lifting the bottle itself and glugging from it as he wandered to the kitchen. After drinking some more and opening another bottle, a better bottle, the rectory seemed pleasingly out of order. When I came through to the kitchen Mark had turned his vandal's fingers to the delicate pressing and sticking of cigarette papers.

'Any roach material?' he said.

I shrugged and he leaned over and lifted a business card from the top of the microwave and tore off a strip. 'That's a good one,' he said, looking at the card. 'The Social Work Department.'

'Good Lord,' I said, and he held it up.

'That's wicked. Don't worry. You can still see her number.'

He took something from the small pocket of his jeans and bent over it with a knife from the worktop. 'I got the Scooby snacks,' he said. 'There you go.' He appeared to have chopped a pill in half and I saw him lift half from the table with a wet finger and put it on his tongue.