Ironopolis Read online

  Mam had drummed it into me: STAY AWAY FROM THE BURN PIPE.

  And, being a good girl, I always had. But then Una got her idea.

  It was autumn and we must have been knocking on thirteen. The falling leaves were the red / gold of Mam’s special New Year tablecloth and crunched like pork scratchings under our feet. I whined the whole way: ‘We don’t even know where it comes out.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Una said, clicking her torch on and off.

  ‘But what if it doesn’t come out anywhere?’

  ‘What if it comes out in another world?’

  ‘There’ll be rats.’

  ‘Rats schmats.’

  We arrived at the bank opposite the pipe. The burn flowed on, towards the Tees, further than I had ever been. Without taking her shoes and socks off, Una sloshed into the water up to her bruised shins.

  ‘Una, I don’t want to…’

  She pulled the spool of twine out of her knickers. ‘It’s like that minotaur story from school. We won’t get lost.’

  ‘We should go back.’

  ‘Haway, Jean. Don’t be a wimp.’

  ‘I’m not being a wimp.’

  She hoofed up a wing of water. ‘We’re always saying how boring everything round here is. Well this is adventure.’

  ‘But I’ve got my new clothes on.’ Which was true. A peach-coloured blouse and cotton skirt from Woolies.

  Una’s eyes narrowed to knife nicks. ‘I’m going in with or without you.’

  ‘Una, please.’

  She tossed the spool into the pipe and clambered up after it.

  ‘Please.’ I had tears in my eyes.

  She tied one end of the twine to a bolt on the pipe’s rim and tugged it to make sure it held. The pipe sighed around her. Stooping, she shone the torch down its throat, wolf-howling – Awoooooo – after it. Her face was all twisted when she looked back at me.

  ‘Last chance,’ she said.

  ‘Una…’ I said uselessly.

  ‘Tell them I died a hero’s death,’ she said, and melted into the darkness.

  I was frantic. I paced and blubbered along the bank. Once, twice, three times I took off my shoes and socks and tippy-toed into the freezing water, only to once, twice, three times turn back. I thought about running home and telling Mam, but I’d already been warned about being here. Plus, there was the unspoken rule every child knows – you NEVER told. Still, what if Una got lost? Became nothing but bones and a ghost story herself? I felt pulled in so many directions that the only thing for it was to sit on the bank and wait.

  Una was right. I was a wimp.

  Time passed. The light faded and cold crept on. To stave off panic, I started setting meaningless deadlines: ‘One more minute and I’m leaving! One elephant, two elephant, three elephant…’ But after sixty elephants had trooped past trunk-to-tail, I didn’t budge. Then: ‘Right, when that tree-shadow gets to that rock, I’m off!’ Watching it inch towards its destination was torture because I knew I wasn’t going anywhere once it did. I tried getting angry – this was all Una’s fault! She had no right! But the gathering darkness chose to throw its weight behind Fear, not Rage, and my hissy fit quickly fizzled.

  Finally, unable to hack it any longer, I got up to leave. I was just brushing the muck off when I heard a noise from deep within the pipe.

  ‘Una?’ I said, as loudly as I dared.

  No answer. The noise got louder. What sounded like footsteps. Clanging footsteps getting closer.

  ‘Una is that you?’

  Clang…clang…clang…

  ‘This isn’t funny…’

  Clang…clang…clang…

  ‘Una, I’m leaving you!’

  The string Una had tied to the bolt snapped and disappeared down the pipe like sucked spaghetti. It was sprinting now – Clang! Clang! Clang! – and just like Nana, my legs wouldn’t work – CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! – The pipe opened wider, ready to swallow me, and a hideous voice wailed:

  JJJJJJEEEEEAAANNNNNN!

  I stumbled, tumbled into snarls of brambles, screaming.

  Una’s pale, laughing face appeared at the mouth of the pipe. ‘Did you think it was Peg Powler come to get you?’ She sploshed into the burn and waded up the bank to where I lay struggling in the thorns. I kicked at her hand when she held it out for me.

  ‘Jean, I was just joking.’

  With smears of scum under each eye, Una watched me struggle free. My whole body felt slashed. Blood from my cut wrist stained my blouse, which was torn and twisted around me. I got shakily to my feet.

  ‘God,’ Una said, ‘it was just a joke.’

  ‘I hate you,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t mean to scare you.’

  ‘I wasn’t scared!’

  She almost managed to supress her smile. Almost.

  I stormed off through the dead leaf drifts before she could see me cry, my name following me through the trees as I did.

  Oh, did I catch it when I got home! As punishment, I had to spend the whole half-term clearing out the cellar for the rag-and-bone man. Hauling stacks of mouldy old Gazettes and scuzzy lino offcuts in damp boxes that came apart in my hands. There were spiders, too. Big ones. But I never told on Una because, really, who was there to tell? She wasn’t Mam’s daughter. As young as I was, I still grasped the fact that getting my mother involved would have only rocked the uneasy reality of my family’s relationship with hers. Una was allowed to keep me company while I worked, and she took care of the spiders for me because she felt bad. In the shadows of the cellar’s single bare bulb, I was bedraggled and gaunt-looking. We looked like twins down there, I thought, me and Una. But only down there. That distinction being the real difference between us.

  Now that I’m a mother, I look back differently on that day at the pipe. I wasn’t a wimp. On the contrary, the reason I didn’t follow Una was not because I was afraid of life, but because I valued life. It was Una who had no regard for it, because precious few people had ever had regard for her.

  In your letter, you told me that the trail on Una had gone cold – ‘dead’ was the word I think you used – so it’s impossible to know if she ever had children of her own. This may sound harsh, but I hope she never did. In a way, the Cruickshanks were a lot like this estate falling to pieces around me now. Just not up to supporting multiple generations.

  Tired now. More soon.

  Jean.

  17/5/1991

  Dear Stephan,

  What did you want to be when you grew up? Not what you became, I imagine. How many bairns dream of becoming art dealers? In my day, boys aspired to be train drivers and girls wanted to get married, or be air hostesses. Personally, my own future was always clouded, though I did do well enough at school to pass my 11+ and get into Thornaby Grammar. This was a real source of pride for my parents, as it was unusual for someone from my background to do that (my sister Agnes hadn’t, much to my satisfaction). It also meant I no longer had to go to school with the likes of Elsie Stanger and my other bullies. I met new girls, started making friends.

  Una bombed the 11+ and ended up at the secondary modern on the outskirts of the estate, ‘Scunner Academy’ as my Thornaby friends called it. Not that Una cared. You could have put her on the moon and she would have kept painting those riverbanks. She was focused in a way I would never be. For instance, I used to write. Just silly little stories and poems that I never showed anyone, and which I stopped once I got a bit older and boys came along. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that, but giving up was easy because I didn’t have the fire the way Una did.

  In this respect, Alan is like me. He drifts. Vincent is always on at him to get a job, get a trade, and I try telling him our son just isn’t cut out for that kind of thing. Besides, it’s 1991. What ‘trade’ is there? Since I was a lass, the forges have been privatised, consolidated, chopped up, sold off. Why mak
e steel here if it’s cheaper to ship from China? Everybody is being made redundant – tens of thousands of people. Whole communities. Ironopolis is falling.

  Even so, Vincent says: ‘There’s always work for a man what can use his hands.’ (Vincent’s hands are as hard as gravestones. I suspect he likes having parts of himself he can’t feel.) He accuses me of mollycoddling our son. And maybe that’s true, but I have my reasons.

  It isn’t motherly bias when I say Alan is one of the brightest people I’ve ever met. It’s just that formal education never sat right with him. When he was fifteen, he had an accident and missed a lot of school. He tried catching up, but it would have been beyond anyone. He did badly in his CSEs, and the NVQs I encouraged him to do afterwards weren’t a good fit either, so now he’s in limbo like most folk around here. He did recently manage to get a part time job at the library in town, which at least gets him out of the house a few hours a week, but I still worry he’ll shrivel up and lose his natural curiosity. I dread he forgets there are other ways to view the world, so thinks the world around him is the only one there is.

  So I do my part to keep him engaged. For example, I have him bring home books from the library for him to read to me. Unfortunately for him, I have something of a weakness for the Danielle Steeles’ and Jackie Collins’ and, yes, the Mills and Boons’ of this world, so we alternate those with books of his choosing. Alan hoovers up everything: astronomy, science, history, someone called Neecha (is that the spelling?). I’m not ashamed to admit most of it sends me cross-eyed. At the minute, we’re learning about bridges. Did you know that in 1885, a woman threw herself off the Clifton Suspension Bridge (245ft) because she’d had a fight with her boyfriend, only for her big floaty Victorian dress and frilly underthings to slow her fall enough for her to survive? Tell me Stephan, does that count as being unlucky in love?

  What am I on about? I’m trying to tell you about the library van.

  Me and Una were bookworms, but while she liked reading about trapped riveters, I preferred more traditional stories. Enid Blyton was my thing: ‘The Famous Five,’ ‘The Wishing Chair,’ ‘Naughty Amelia Jane,’ and ‘Mr Twiddle.’ My favourite was ‘The Magic Faraway Tree,’ because of the helter-skelter down the centre of the trunk. Mam would climb into bed with me and read until I dropped off. Later, when I got older, I began reading along with her, until soon enough I was tearing through book after book on my own. By the time I got into my teens, I’d moved onto more ‘mature’ stories like the Marcy Rhodes series, which all my Thornaby friends were reading. They were full of squeaky-clean blondies, torn between two college-bound buzzcut boys – the Quarterback (whatever that was) or the Debate Team Champ (ditto) – as the Big Dance loomed. It was an alien American world that jarred with the one I knew, with the coal scuttles and cups of Bovril with cream crackers crumbled in. The way the back boiler never caught on mornings so nithering the first thing you saw when you opened your eyes was your own breath clouding above you. There were also books in Thornaby Grammar’s library with titles like ‘Air Hostess Ann,’ and ‘Emily in Electronics’: about young lasses heading out into the World of Work. Usually they ended up leaving their male colleagues in the dust, doing so well that the boss’ reward was to marry them and give them a big house full of bairns to look after. Daft, but we just accepted that kind of thing back then.

  Every second Wednesday, the mobile library would come down Loom street, and I looked forward to that for two reasons. One, I wanted grown up books, and two, the man who drove that van. Henry. My first real crush.

  If Teddy Boys had long since been out of style come the early 1960s, nobody had seen fit to tell Henry. He still booted around in his drape coat and brothel creepers, his hair pomaded into sleek liquorice. Swallow tattoos on his hands where his thumbs and index fingers met. Proper Geordie and proud, he said. Had grown up on Arthur’s Hill, a stone’s throw from St. James’ Park. My name in his mouth did something to me that I still then didn’t fully understand. He could make that ‘ee’ go on forever: Jeeeean…

  I couldn’t loan silly little girl books from Henry, so one second-Wednesday I put on my best skirt and sneaked a dab of Mam’s perfume. I hung at the back of the van, browsing the shelves while Henry served the bairns. He was so good with children. Back then, remember, it was the era of speak-when-you’re-spoken-to, of watch-your-Ps-and-Qs, but Henry let them say whatever they wanted. He crouched down to their level, looked them right in the eye, and didn’t flinch from their sticky little hands. I didn’t know why his being good like that was attractive to me, but it was.

  Once most of the bairns were gone, I picked out the thickest book I could find and plonked it down for him to stamp.

  He read the title. ‘Finnegan’s Wake. Its canny big, like.’

  My thing at the time was Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which me and my Thornaby friends had seen five thousand times at the Ritzy. I fixed him with the coquettish pout I’d perfected in the mirror, and in my best Audrey, said, ‘I suppose you think I’m very brazen or tres fou or something?’

  A blank look. I was mortified. He stamped the front page and handed the book back to me. Our transaction was complete.

  Desperate to keep talking, I said, ‘Have you read it?’

  ‘I’m not a reader.’

  ‘But you drive a library…’

  He shrugged.

  Someone else was behind me. Henry’s eyes moved over my shoulder and I was forgotten.

  Oh Jean! Stupid, stupid Jean! I scurried away with my book, on the lookout for the nearest hole to crawl into, but just as I was leaving I heard Henry say, ‘I know this one! I saw a film of this.’ I looked back.

  Henry was turning the copy of ‘Frankenstein’ over in his hands. He said, ‘They stuck a hunchback’s brain in his body and he smashed up this posh dinner party.’

  ‘I don’t like films,’ Una said, popping her elbow.

  He looked at her strangely, a slow smile spreading. ‘Who doesn’t like films?’

  ‘I don’t want their pictures in my head.’

  ‘You’re a serious one, aren’t you?’ He stamped the book and held it out to her, but when she took it he didn’t let go.

  ‘And you,’ Una said, ‘are you serious?’ Her voice was low and fluid in a way that unsettled me. Her eyes on his, the book trembling between them.

  ‘Where it counts,’ he said, letting go.

  Neither of them seemed to be aware of my presence. I felt like a Peeping Tom, a creep.

  ‘Tell me how it ends, eh?’ he said.

  I left the van and stalked home, my fingernails digging into the cover of my ridiculous book. What had just happened? Here was the one area I felt sure I had the better of Una, and yet everything I thought I knew about boys had somehow just been brushed aside by her flinty weirdness. She didn’t even have a chest!

  Which is, Stephan, all to say that I was out of my mind with jealousy.

  I have to go. Alan’s bringing the tea up now. Tonight, we’re tackling some of the new Judith Krantz (Alan’s birthday gift to me – I turned 45 a couple of weeks ago. Vincent got me the black dress from Selfridges I’ve had my eye on). Krantz-wise, I’ll bring you up to speed: Eve was all set to become an opera singer before she defied her family and ran off with a music-hall crooner. But then he got pneumonia, and Eve was a smash when she started singing to pay the bills. Now this posh lad Paul de Lancel is sniffing about Eve. Not sure what his snooty family will make of it when he inevitably makes his move…

  There’s been a few racy bits. Alan gets a little flustered in places, bless him.

  As always,

  Jean.

  1/6/1991

  Dear Stephan,

  When we were about fourteen, Una’s mother Talitha hit a rough patch and never quite recovered, although that we realised only in retrospect. Una had already told me what little she knew about her mother. When Talitha was about the
same age we were then, she, along with her five brothers and sisters, were preparing to escape Poland to some distant Teesside relative, just as their country became a bloodbath. I’ve had Alan read me the history. In September 1939, the German armies advanced from the west, bombing and burning and slaughtering at random. Terrified Polish civilians fled east, only to run smack into the Red Army, who had signed a pact of non-aggression with the Nazis. Millions were lost: men, women, and children were massacred, raped, or worked to death in Siberian gulags. Twenty thousand souls per mass grave. Over three million Polish Jews alone erased in the Final Solution.

  But what the books don’t explain is how Talitha, a teenage girl who had previously never left her home town, could be swallowed up by such atrocity only to reappear on British shores three years later, clutching in a hand that was missing a ring finger a scrap of paper with her second-cousin’s address on it. Those three years – where had she been? How had she survived where millions perished? What had happened to her parents? Her brothers and sisters? It was a mystery not even Una knew. Then, three months after her arrival on Teesside, the now eighteen-year-old Talitha met and married George Cruickshank, a young private. She fell pregnant just before he was shipped to Sicily, where he lasted less than six months. When George came back he wasn’t, as they say, the same.

  Those were the facts as I knew them, but facts, as you know, aren’t everything.

  The last time I talked to Talitha was in the summer holidays a year after I’d started Thornaby, which would make it 1961. I wasn’t seeing as much of Una by then, and my accumulated guilt eventually drove me to knock on her door one morning to see if she was in. Talitha answered, which was exactly what I hoped wouldn’t happen.

  The kitchen reeked. From the ceiling hung flypapers so loaded with bluebottles that they sagged like rank party streamers. Lino filthy. Sink clogged with dirty crockery. I declined tea, but she started making it anyway. Her loose-fitting dressing gown was Chinese in style, stitched all over with their funny writing. It kept falling open to reveal a stained chemise through which her large, dark nipples showed.