The Folded Man (4 page)

4.

Sunday, early doors, Noah takes Brian to see a man about a suit.

They travel fast from east Manchester to south – to Didsbury, a fortress suburb hanging a few miles beneath the city centre. There are barricades to cross and papers to show. Old-guard gents waving shotguns at checkpoints – waving them through with two-hour permits and winks that double as warnings. They're given a transponder. They're told to leave it on the dash – a box with eyes to watch, ears to listen. There'll be no riff-raff here – not in Didsbury.

Brian and Noah pass handsome gardens and clean pavements. Round this way, there aren't potholes or exposed mains to slalom. The people of Didsbury power their own land with generators; their cars with fuel they make from used cooking oil. They recycle the way the whole city used to. Their kids still play outside – wash working cars for neighbours, run the community paper-rounds. People walk dogs. Men work. Men wake to alarm clocks and warm, willing wives.

Didsbury is a time-capsule. Didsbury, strung at the edges with sharpline, is a suburb running on tradition.

Brian and Noah don't talk. Brian and Noah drive ­slowly.

They pull up on double-yellows
outside a Victorian semi. Noah says, Alight here for quality
tailoring by Manchester's finest. Next, that reseating routine, the
last three minutes of any journey forever the same. Noah
gets out and opens the boot, unfolds the wheelchair. ­Brian
shuffles. Opens the door. From seated to sitting. To rattling
and rolling.

Noah rings the bell since Brian can't reach. They look thick as thieves, the pair of them. Lumps spooned from the same gravy.

The door swings. Inside, inside, says a small, white-haired man, the look of a jeweller about him. A busy-body. A small man with big pockets.

The suit maker's house is foppish, regency in style. It's almost a parody of things that used to matter – pointless; a way to speak of class when nobody's left to care. Boots and brothel-creepers all over the place. Dozens of nude mannequins: totems of strange alabaster muscle staring ahead. Two or three wearing ties.

They enter the lounge. Smell pipe smoke and see old paintings – paintings of hunts and gentry.

The suit maker, he bumbles and bimbles; flits between the furniture. It's obvious he works in measurements and time. It's true what Noah said, too – true that the suit maker asks his visitors few questions for good reason. When the needy visit Didsbury, their hours here are tallied, their movements carefully logged. The needy can be dangerous, and too many answers from dangerous people can fill your brain; can make you an asset.

How long do you have? is one question the suit maker asks.

Hour and a half tops, Noah says, checking his watch.

Not long enough, the suit maker says. Your friend is rather substantial.

Long enough to get something off the shelf, Noah says.

It's a rare thing in Didsbury, is rudeness, says the suit maker. A rare thing.

Brian looks down at his blanket; at the tube of meat he calls a tail. He says, I'll only need a jacket. Extra large or whatever. A white, ironed shirt to fit.

Well, we may have something in storage, says the suit maker. But as I say. It may be difficult. Arms up, please.

Brian raises his arms, feels the tape measure tighten; the tape measure wrapping his chest.

Very good, says the suit maker. He disappears down a narrow corridor.

Noah turns to Brian. You'll look a bobby-dazzler, kid.

But Brian feels trapped between this handsome wallpaper and his duty.

The suit maker returns with two jackets. He walks like a sad pigeon, his belt tight and scaffolding his belly.

A suit jacket to broaden the shadow, the suit maker says, holding up a pin-stripe navy jacket. Or this smart number: a jacket to sharpen the shoulders.

They help Brian put the first jacket on, shuffling the collar. It crushes his chest. The suit maker and Noah are smiling thinly. Brian looks back at himself, all sharp lines and deep creases. A crushed flower.

A suit to broaden the shadow. A suit to sharpen the shoulders.

They help Brian try the second jacket. It's a convenient fit.

Expect we'll need to taper these parts, says the suit maker, pulling at the material on Brian's flanks.

Brian doesn't feel himself at all.

No time for that, says Noah. We'll pay up and move on.

Move on where? says Brian.

Noah looks at Brian's hat. See a man about a haircut.

 

 

In the car, leaving Didsbury with the suit jacket over the back seat, Brian's eyes are wet and watering. Brian doesn't want to see any man about any kind of haircut. Brian can't look at Noah. Can't really see for tears. Cannot speak for these deepening fears.

Noah is shouting. Noah's taken Brian's hat and pulled a sun visor down. Noah's saying, Look at yourself, man. Just bloody look at yourself. You think that's credible? Think that's what an old soldier looks like?

Brian is sobbing, Brian can't look in mirrors, can't understand. Don't do this to me, he's saying.

But Noah is shouting and swearing, isn't he. Driving faster. You fuck this up for me I'll swing for you, he shouts, hurling them at sixty towards this hair appointment in the centre of town. Balls this up and we'll have ourselves a big fall out.

 

Brian has a plastic bag filled with hair. He is quiet. He is numb. He is Samson, shorn bald. Medusa, beheaded. King Nisos, bereft.

The bag of hair's in his lap. Something lost he must preserve.

Noah starts the car.

All right. Good lad. Now, we go yours first, he says. Got the medals in the boot. We get ready there –

Brian feels scared and cold. No longer comforted by a myth he's made; no longer protected by the strange habits of superstition.

I don't want you at mine, he says.

For now, till the stubble grows out, he's been forced from a habit formed on the back of his mother's words.

Formed on a belief system fuelled by encyclopaedias and legends; ancient tales of boats led to rocks where sailors drown.

Rocks where survivors eat the flesh of sirens – kill and eat the harlots who brought them so close to death.

Eat them and live forever.

 

Another stop, this one for petrol and limp butties. Two men from the margins at the old Texaco on the edge of town. Right on the edge of all things light and everything good – the dusk yards they call it round this way. The dusk yards being a line you cross to find yourself tipped into night and all things worse. Tipped beyond the city – where roads are blacker without neon and street-lamps. No curfews. No law.

Brian stays in the car on account of his tail; stays in the car to cut another pair of lines for them both, to straighten his tie and smooth his collar.

Want owt? says Noah.

Nah, says Brian, playing with the baggie.

Brian hears Noah fill up the car. Smells petrol, breathes it down. Brian pours the coke and starts to smooth the lines. Sees Noah by the pay-grate, stacking up tight in a queue three-long. Sees the shotgun pointed outwards.

Brian edges the lines. Cuts them. Edges them again. He looks up at the splitting canopy, across at the empty boxes for the old free press. The rusting pumps. A bush of nettles. Rainbows in puddles –

These broken things you don't forget. These photos your brain takes.

Fell a long way our city, he thinks, looking down at these posh clothes and this bloody meat he's got for legs. A long, lengthy way. He looks up. Sees Noah coming back. Noah smirking.

But we're still scrabbling on the walls
.

Noah gets in all lumpen, banging the door and blurring the coke in Brian's lap. Says, Shit – sorry mate. Only ham here as well; gutted.

Ham because pigs are the only things worth farming.

Brian, he looks at his life from a distance, on this forecourt, with these dreams and this tail. Polarity, animosity. Duality.

No handles to hold, no harness to lift.

He leans down –

Rails everything in the tray.

 

The pair of them, clipping from Manchester towards the Woodhead Pass at a flat sixty, Brian wired, half-cut, head out the window with a stomach turning over and over, too wired for nerves.

Noah is suited and booted, enjoying the corners, teaching Brian a different sort of line. Lines to learn; lines about his role in the war, where he served, who he served with. Noah's talking about gallows humour and one-liners for big grins, saying things like, Good things don't come in small packages, Brian. Letterbombs do.

They pass signs to Sheffield – green signs scrubbed and crossed through, overwritten with graffiti – A57 Crater one says. Never a good place to visit, everyone thinks. Rarer still to drive out this way, up and over the tops.

Manchester, that tall city in their mirrors, waits to turn on. Manchester, the shrinking city in their mirrors, quickly gone.

They hit the M67, windows flashing grey and flickering with shadows and skeletons from the foot bridges and bare bushes. Five miles of motorway to themselves. The hills loom closer, four PM on the nose, dusk falling by increments.

Rain clouds roll in to slate the biggest roof.

They cover the last stretch of unlit motorway and pay their dues; pull away from the tolls by Hindley's Hattersley and edge downhill to dodge so many potholes. The fear of blockade gangs. No lights or holo-boards down this way. No cars either; nobody heading anywhere, the only noise from a couple of patrol levs whining over.

Through villages, grim grey villages – Shipman's Mottram, Tintwistle, all empty you'd think but full with ills – and on again, down and up, before the road cuts into dark green proper. Before the smell of death comes through all the windows. Before the rain can start.

Grim up north, says Noah, the Nissan pushing fifty in old thirty zones. About fifty more than it should manage, the way he drives it.

All around, the Pennines, these endless moors, crowd the car with long shadows. Once, it was a beautiful drive, the A628 – and not only if the light was right. It's thoroughfare, yes, a long bridge between Manchester and Sheffield, but to have so much green so close to a city was once seen as lucky –

Now, it's all weeds and damaged road surfaces. A ragged scar on the face of nature. Cracked tarmac scattered with bits of dry-stone walls pushed over by unpruned trees. And every hundred yards, an old orange SOS phone stands rotting, while the ghosts of freight lorries and tailgaters, the traffic you'd see here till four or five years back, echo and echo as memories.

The road winds on and up, ponderous. There's a funny camber to the corners. The men look into valleys, down into empty reservoirs; into the lay-bys and up the slab-sides of limestone. Ahead at the clouds, above at the trees. The rain chases them. And they see the walls with orange nets pinned on, the walls where people didn't brake soon enough. They remember dark stories of rapes and shallow graves. Imagine the dread –

The big open space makes for powerful wind. These hills are bleak; cold and shattered by gales.

How far from here? says Brian, chewing his face, gurning at the blackening sky with eyes cranked wide.

Flouch roundabout and a bit beyond, Noah says. Old farm buildings up that way.

Time we due?

Five, but can't roll in till Garland gives me the nod.

You know who you're looking for?

Aye. Two in particular.

He knows I'm with you?

No. And won't.

How come?

Because it's all about format. Let him think he's got me climbing drains. Romantic that way.

 

They're just past Flouch roundabout, towards Langsett, towards the M1 – the motorway you don't drive without armour or escorts. Past Flouch roundabout, on more winding roads to nowhere, when a pair of Defenders pull out in front.

Noah swerves, the offside bumper already gone up the wall. The car stalls, a wash of tyres over gravel – the whole thing as fast as that.

Next: three men in balaclavas, balaclavas with surplus army jackets; three men in balaclavas with guns. And Brian holds his ears, the coke biting now. Fear chewing his stomach out.

Rifles pointed through glass. Rifles and eye-holes, eyes and mouths, men barking, Out! Out the fucking car!

Noah and Brian raise their hands – that universal reflex.

Out!

Noah shouting, Easy! Easy!

Two men at the doors, gun barrels in two frightened faces.

While shepherds watch, one man says.

Another: Out fucking car, pair of you.

Noah spills from the door, stumbles out on to the road, looking back at Brian. Brian's trapped inside with both hands over his head; sweating and puffing, very red.

Gentlemen, the man in front of the car says, his rifle high. Not right road for you pair, this. Right turn were few mile back, actually.

We're –

Hush now. What's up with him in there, the man asks, pointing. Daft, is he?

He needs his wheelchair, Noah says. You've misunderstood. He can't get out, he's a –

The man kicks Noah's car. The hanging bumper rattles. The echo rolls.

Speak up, lad. Matter with you.

He's – he's disabled.

Mong, aye?

Where you off? asks one of the men.

Meeting. A meeting. And I'm his carer.

Meeting where?

There's a farm –

Get mong out the car, says one of the men.

Noah raises his hands. Noah protests. But he needs his chair, he says.

One man points to another, back to Noah.

Where you driven from? he asks.

Manchester.

And this meeting?

Noah's eyes narrow.

You know what I'm on about. Thinking, Yorkshiremen don't carry rifles like that for sweet F-A.

Open boot, the man goes. And say owt more you'll be swallowing teeth.