Fragile Cord (17 page)

Coupland’s hair was flat around
the back of his crown – his earlier nightmare had put him off
taking a shower, at least until the sound of water sloshing against
tiles stopped making him shudder and the feeling of someone holding
him down evaporated. He ran his fingers through his hair, though he
suspected the regulars hadn’t even registered him, let alone gave a
shit how he looked.

The interior of the pub could
be summed up in one word: Dismal. The drab décor had been the same
for as long as he could remember. Shabby walls, dark rings on the
threadbare carpet, furniture chipped and unstable. Stepping across
the grubby threshold he was hit with the stench of cheap air
freshener, and something else entirely unpleasant. There was a sign
over the door to the only toilet stating it was Out of Order, the
smell of a backed-up drain radiated from it. The carpet was that
sticky Coupland’s feet made a sound like Velcro strips ripping
apart as he crossed the room to the bar. He attracted a couple of
glances from the clientele but only briefly, not out of interest or
even hostility, simply because he had crossed their line of
vision.

There were about a dozen or so
drinkers in the bar. In one corner, a woman with heavy blusher and
comedy lips dragged on a cigarette. Between punters and her next
fix by the look of her, eyes tired rather than vacant stared into
the bottom of an empty glass. Her bright red lips were wonky, as
though painted on by a toddler, an epileptic one at that. Coupland
wondered if she’d put her lipstick on hurriedly, in the dark, in
the back of some executive’s car after an expense account blowjob.
She looked like she was smiling even when she wasn’t. She caught
him watching her and the red stain of her lips spread even wider
across her face. She stuck out her chest and tugged her dirty
V-neck an inch lower. Horrified, he averted his gaze, escaped to
the other side of the bar.

‘What can I get you love?’ The
landlady asked without looking up, reading an article from a
women’s magazine. The magazine had been folded over, a photograph
of two unhappy sisters emblazoned across the middle. The landlady
tutted and shook her head a couple of times and Coupland hoped it
was aimed at the article’s cheating love rat who’d wronged the
gullible siblings, rather than him.

The landlady finished her
article and looked up from the magazine, stared at him impatiently
as though he was keeping her form something pressing. She was
short, five two at the most, with a large bust that made her head
look curiously small. Several gold chains – heavy links, not hollow
– hung from her crêpey neck. A gold watch was fastened securely on
her flaccid wrist, several bangles and a lucky charm bracelet
jangled loudly on the other. She was tanned too, a recently baked
tan made all the more obvious when she frowned as white lines
appeared around her eyes and mouth – she had obviously laughed a
lot on her holiday. Probably laughed all the way to the bank,
Coupland found himself thinking as he contrasted her complexion
with the pallid, indoor skin of her regulars.

There was money to be made from
the poor and the desperate and everyone was cashing in - from the
money-lenders and drug dealers to the sharply dressed store staff
who peddled TVs and stereos on credit, not giving a toss about how
the repayments will be made, or whether they’ll be made at all.
Funny how the poorest towns were all the same: crap schools and
shoddy housing, high streets full of bookies and off-licences,
electrical shops and video stores, over-flowing pubs selling cheap
booze and knock-off fags.

The segregation was subtle;
banks were pulling out of inner city areas, setting up call-centres
in far off places that only people with phones and telephone
banking accounts could access. Closed branches were converted into
trendy bars - more places for the neglected to drink themselves
silly when their benefit came through. The only professional
services the high streets round here offered were defence lawyers
and ambulance chasers, and naive women who climbed into strangers’
cars to score crack for their boyfriends.

The landlady stared at Coupland. The
lines round her eyes and mouth resembled ancient tribal
markings.

‘I’m looking for Flemish Joe.’
he informed her.

Her mouth tightened. The rumble
of a smoker’s cough nearby distracted him, he waited while the
dislodged phlegm was either ejected or swallowed, he didn’t much
care to turn and discover which.

‘He’s not welcome in ‘ere any
more love.’ The woman replied. ‘Stank the bloody place out.’

The words had been spoken
without a shred of irony and Coupland stifled a smile, his eyes
flitting over to the sign on the toilet door and back again. The
last vestiges of courtesy disappeared from her face now she knew
the company he kept. She folded her heavy tanned arms.

‘Anything else?’

She barked the question as
though he was keeping her from something vital and he looked back
at the magazine she’d discarded on the counter for confirmation -
the TV crossword, perhaps? His eyes were drawn back to the optics
as though under the power of some magnetic force and he wondered if
for one magical moment they could truly drown his sorrows.

‘A scotch please. Make it a
large one.’

A cruel smile played on her
lips; she’d met his type before - many times he didn’t wonder - saw
him for what he was, rather than the man he wanted to be. He took
his drink and threw the money onto the bar. Without warning he
strode over to the hooker with the clown-like lips and placed the
glass down in front of her. Before his brain registered what the
hell he was doing he gave her a nod then slammed out into the warm
morning air in search of his friend.

The first time Coupland had set
eyes on Joe he’d been sitting in the doorway of the Flemish Weaver,
a concrete pub looking onto Salford Crescent station, a suburban
railway line providing links to Manchester City Centre in one
direction, and Blackpool in the other. The previous night had been
a bitter one, with temperatures dropping below zero and no let-up
in sight. It had been during the week-long bender he’d embarked
upon following the murder of Siobhan Lewisham. A week of serious
drinking punctuated by short bursts of sleep and a craving for
fried food. It was a time when each morning came as a bitter-sweet
shock to him, proof that he’d made it through another night. He’d
not long been promoted to Sergeant, and already he’d come to the
attention of the powers-that-be – though for all the wrong reasons.
A period of extended leave had been the official recommendation, a
reminder that he couldn’t kick the shit out of suspects anymore;
the days of the ends justifying the means were long gone.

It was during this particular
fall from grace that Lynn had taken Amy and moved back to her
mother’s. It was only ever intended as a short sharp shock, a
wakeup call that his recklessness was impacting their marriage. The
house had run to ruin, the cupboards bare, the kitchen bin
overflowing with take-out cartons and chip shop wrappers. One
particular morning he’d set off in his car driving slowly – careful
not to draw attention from the boys on traffic – towards an
all-night café on a side road just off from Salford Crescent. The
thought of hot food drew him like a magnet, so when he first
spotted the pile of rags in the pub doorway he’d tried to ignore it
– even when it moved. It wasn’t like this was an unusual sight -
far from it. With an increasing number of towns being hit by
unemployment many hard-working men began their short journey to
homelessness through addiction to drink or drugs. Rejected by their
families they relied on soup vans for hot food and shelters for the
occasional place to bed down.

When he
thought about it later, two things had drawn Coupland to Joe that
day: Firstly, when he’d passed him at the side of the road he’d
continued to watch in his rear view mirror as he’d clambered to his
feet standing ram-rod straight and meticulously brushed down his
overcoat, inspecting it for dirt. Secondly, he’d pulled a rag out
of his pocket then spat on it before carefully polishing his boots.
Before the drink took over, Coupland’s father had held great store
by how smartly a man kept himself, a barometer that Coupland found
himself using more and more.
The poor sod
might be down
, he’d muttered to
himself,
but he’s certainly not
out.

Doubling the car back round in
a U-turn Coupland pulled up his car on the opposite side of the
road and walked towards the vagrant who shuffled along the pavement
like a psychiatric patient. He was as tall as Coupland but broader
too, although it was hard to tell if it was the several layers of
clothes he wore that made him look stocky. Matted brown hair framed
a gaunt face hidden by stubble. He had the haggard cheeks of
someone malnourished or dependent on drugs yet his eyes were sharp
and focussed. He stopped his shuffling as Coupland approached and
surveyed him warily, his heavy breath hanging before him like
rolling mist.

‘I don’t know about you but I’m
starving,’ Coupland had said to him, ‘Will you let me buy you
something to eat?’

He’d kept the driver’s window open to
keep a fresh blast of air circulating around the car, and offered
his companion a smoke. His name was Joe, he’d informed him,
reluctantly at first, but he began to relax when he realised that
Coupland wasn’t after a hand-job, that there was no expectation of
sexual favours in exchange for feeding him. Turned out he was an
ex-naval officer, which was no surprise. The number of homeless had
swelled with ex-servicemen medically discharged from Iraq and
Afghanistan, considered sick in the head they were dispatched
quietly, denied a hero’s return.

After their
introductions they’d lapsed into silence, an easy one, given the
time of day and their respective blood-alcohol levels. The
all-night café was just off the crescent and a sign outside
stated:
All Day Brekfasts surved
here
. Apart from a hostile glare the owner
sent in Joe’s direction when they’d first walked in – quickly
remedied by a flash of Coupland’s warrant card – their meal was a
pleasant one, and they quietly devoured two full greasy fry ups and
several mugs of all-you can-drink, bitter-as-tar coffee.

Joe was quietly spoken, polite.
He took his time answering Coupland’s questions, as though he felt
they deserved a well-thought out answer. He was a thinker, a
dweller, a man who pondered on life’s possibilities far more than
was good for him. Nonetheless, Coupland, himself a man of few
words, found himself drawn to Joe.

Joe had served
in the Royal Navy during the Falkands conflict. A petty officer on
HMS Plymouth, in charge of sonar equipment.
We were hit on the eighth of
June,
he informed Coupland, piling a
large knob of butter onto slightly overdone toast.
Just before the bloody war ended, can you believe
that?
Coupland had nodded, he knew all
about the vagaries of fate.
Aircraft
attack,
Joe continued, receding gums
displaying tar-stained canine-length teeth. His breath was foul,
but like most unpleasant things after a period of exposure,
Coupland became immune to the stench, focussing instead on what his
companion had to say.

I remember bouncing up into the
air, looking down on my fellow officers, all of them grown men,
crawling into the smallest spaces for cover. I thought I had died,
that that was why I was up in the air while everyone else remained
on the ground, shouting.

He took a bite of his toast,
wiped his chin with the paper serviette where the butter had melted
leaving a patch of clean skin.

I saw the bodies of our Chief
Mechanic and Stoker burn to nothing, could hear their screams but I
was powerless, it was as though I was stuck in some sort of
limbo….By the time I came to I was in a makeshift military
hospital, told I’d been suffering from shock.

He said the words dismissively,
as though ashamed he’d survived the attack, while others had
perished.

The problem
with fighting a war 8000 miles away
, he’d
added,
is that for many it just wasn’t
real. People back at home carried on with their day-to-day lives,
the war to them meant nothing other than a ten-minute bulletin on
the evening news. Unless you had a father, a brother, a husband or
a son caught up in it, it passed you by.

Coupland had dropped his gaze,
conscious of the truth in Joe’s words. He’d been a youngster at the
time, caught up with his own problems and weaknesses. He remembered
the sinking of the Belgrano, and the Welsh guardsman who’d been
horrifically burned on the Sir Galahad, but little else. He hadn’t
given a thought to the servicemen, hadn’t concerned himself with
their families and what they’d been going through.

It’s
OK,
Joe had reassured him,
why should you be any different?

Life goes on.

They’d met regularly for breakfast
after that, and each time Joe had offered up a little bit more of
himself. He’d had a wife, Marie, and a daughter. Sophie. Six weeks
old when he’d gone off to war. Both killed in a hit and run while
he’d been recuperating in a mental hospital following the first of
his many breakdowns.

Like I told you Kevin, the war didn’t
change anyone’s lives over here. Criminals carried on committing
their crimes, and gutless bastards carried on ploughing into
pedestrians and driving off without a second thought.

He was poised as he said this.
Measured. But his watery blue eyes told a different story.

I talk to her
sometimes
, he’d said suddenly once, on
another of their meetings.
My Marie…………I
know that sounds stupid…
..