“I’m like a bird.”
Manny and Hugh are perched on the second-from-top step outside the library, their knees drawn up and their shoulders hunched against the cold. A never-ending stream of mid-morning traffic coils back and forth along the narrow high street in front of them, filling the wintry air with a constant rumble and a blue-grey choke of exhaust fumes.
Hugh cups a grimy hand around his cigarette lighter, trying to light the dead stub of a roll-up hanging from his lip.
“What?” he says to Manny.
“I’m like a bird,” Manny repeats.
“What kind of bird?”
Manny flicks his head back, rearranging a loose twist of long black hair. “No kind. Just a bird.”
The two men lapse into a comfortable silence – Manny browsing idly through his library book (The A–Z of Serial Killers), while Hugh just sits there watching the world go by. He watches an old lady scuttling along the pavement, dragging a wheeled shopping trolley behind her. He watches (and listens) as a whistling van driver slams his rear doors shut, then whistles his way round to the front of the van, gets in and starts the engine. And he watches a young woman with drug-haunted eyes buying cheap cuts of meat in the butcher’s shop across the road.
“See him?” he says to Manny after a while.
Manny looks up from his book and sees a teenage boy with a rock-hard slab of heavily gelled hair slouching past the library steps.
“Hey, kid!” Hugh calls out. “Where d’you get the hat?”
The boy glances anxiously at the two grubby men on the steps, his hand rising instinctively towards his head. He doesn’t know what Hugh means – what hat? – or if the two men mean him any harm or not. Hugh and Manny don’t help him out, they just sit there staring blankly at him. The boy lowers his hand, looks away, and self-consciously walks on by.
Hugh pulls hard on the half-inch stub of his cigarette, hoping for a final hit, but there’s nothing left of it now. He takes it from his mouth, gives it a disapproving look, then flicks it away. He sticks his hands into the warmth of his coat pockets, automatically feeling (and recognizing) their contents – fluff, bits of a lolly stick, tobacco dust … penknife, string, an unknown key … a partly sucked boiled sweet (coated with fluff and tobacco dust), a pencil stub, tobacco tin…
Across the road, next to the butcher’s, a young couple are looking at the houses for sale in an estate agent’s window. The man is tall and blond, and dressed in a pristine white rugby shirt. His partner – wife? girlfriend? – has perfectly groomed light brown hair and is wearing an unseasonably short dress that leaves little to the imagination.
Hugh stares at her backside, imagining a parallel universe in which he’s the one looking at houses in an estate agent’s window, dressed in a pristine white rugby shirt, with his pretty young wife standing beside him in an unseasonably short dress that draws the attention of two grubby men sitting on the steps outside the library across the road…
The man turns round then, and when he sees Hugh staring at his wife’s/girlfriend’s backside, he narrows his eyes and gives him a tough-guy glare.
Hugh sets the mark of the devil into his face and stares right back, and a moment later the man takes his wife/girlfriend by the arm and moves on.
“Hair, stare, glare, scare,” says Hugh.
“She was there,” adds Manny, “showing off her underwear.”
A lorry shudders to a halt outside the pet shop on the corner. As the airbrakes let out a weary sigh, the driver takes a sheet of paper from his pocket, unfolds it and reads. He frowns for a second or two, scratching his head, then he drops the paper on the seat beside him, puts the lorry into gear, and rumbles off again.
In the pet shop, a woman in glasses is sitting on a stool next to the till, filling mesh bags with peanuts.
The two men sit for a while longer – reading, smoking, sniffing, coughing … watching the December day unravel.
Sometime later, the town hall clock strikes twelve.
“Ready?” says Hugh.
They stand up, slap the dust from their trousers, and set off up the high street. They walk side by side, with unconcerned ease, like two indomitable cowboys, Dusty and Slim, moseying on up to the bunkhouse after a hard morning’s work.
*
This town is known for its swans. They gather at the side of a long straight road that runs alongside the estuary. Visitors from out of town stop their cars, buy ice creams from ice-cream vans and feed the swans. They feed them on bread, crisps, buns, ice cream, nuts and chocolate bars, but the swans remain as white as the morning snow. Manny and Hugh neither like nor dislike them. They’re just there, like everything else.
The two companions dine at Gino’s. Or, to be more accurate, they buy their fish and chips from Gino’s and dine on them across the road on a bench beneath the War Memorial.
Hugh leans his head back, gazing up at the list of names inscribed on the marble monolith above him. Still leaning back, he drops a vinegar-soaked chip into his mouth and chews it slowly.
“They didn’t exactly give their lives for their country, did they?” he says, the chip steam rising from his mouth.
Manny picks pieces of skin from a saveloy and throws them into the gutter. He bites into the skinless meat and watches sparrows and pigeons vying for the scraps.
It’s getting colder now.
When Manny had said he was like a bird, he was referring specifically – if somewhat obliquely – to his total inability to recognize or understand numbers. The prices on Gino’s menu board, for example, mean absolutely nothing to him:
Cod – squiggle.
Saveloy – squiggle.
Chips – squiggle.
He gets by though, like a bird gets by. And Hugh’s always there for him. Always.
Manny holds a steaming fat chip to his mouth and blows on it. The smell of hot vinegar waltzes drunkenly in the winter air.
“Lil might be there tonight,” says Hugh, spitting out a sliver of fish bone.
Tonight is the Christmas dinner at the community centre for the elderly and disadvantaged.
“Fat Lil,” muses Manny.
“Not so fat.”
“Fat enough.”
“For what?”
Manny doesn’t reply. He screws up his chip paper into a ball and lobs it into a wire-mesh bin.
“You’ll be shaving, then?” he says to Hugh.
Hugh shakes his head. “Lil likes a beard.”
“So she does.”
Hugh rolls a cigarette and belches quietly. He steals a reverent glance at Manny, unaware of himself digging his thumbnail deep into the soft wet wood of the bench.
Does he love him?
No one shall ever know anything of that: only he and I and a tiny little bird, Tandaraday! who will never let fall a word.
*
It’s late afternoon now, the pale winter sun beginning to set, and Manny and Hugh are heading home. They move, as ever, at no great pace. Along Station Road, past the flat greyness of the industrial estate, under the railway bridge, past the high-pitched drilling of A1 Auto Services, over the roundabout by the railway station, and on up the hill, on the road out of town.
“You know what I’d like?” says Hugh.
“What?” says Manny, swaying away from the downhill rush of a container lorry.
“A map of the world.”
They stop at a gap in the hedge and lean together over a five-bar metal gate, looking out across the uphill slope of a barren field.
“Where’s all the sheep gone?” says Manny.
“Chopped up for dinners,” says Hugh.
They climb the gate.
As Manny swings a tattered trouser leg over the top bar, a woman cleaning her bedroom window in a house across the road catches a brief glimpse of off-white vagabond pants.
“Oof!” she says.
Manny and Hugh hike their way up the field. A woodpecker bobs across the sky and disappears into its tree, laughing as it goes. Hugh pauses, breaking into a violent fit of coughing. Doubled over, hands on knees, he hawks and hacks until eventually the coughing stops. He spits a final gob, wipes his mouth with his sleeve, then gingerly straightens up.
“All right?” Manny says softly.
Hugh nods.
As they carry on up the slope, the dilapidated wire-mesh fence at the top of the hill draws closer. Beyond it lies their home – a derelict mansion house. There’s not much left of the once-grand building. Anything of value has long since been wrecked or stripped away – glass, tiles, lead, stonework – and all that’s left now is a desolate shell. The roof has gone – the few remaining broken timbers jutting out like ancient yellowed bones – and the crumbling stone walls are holed with glassless windows. A hundred years ago, the courtyard in front of the house would have hosted splendid garden parties for the privileged few, but now it’s just a cracked and weed-infested concrete square strewn with rubble and waste – empty beer cans and cider bottles, used syringes, shredded carrier bags, the desiccated remains of long-dead animals…
It’s a place that reeks of fallen grace. From a mansion house to a tuberculosis sanatorium during the war, from a sanatorium to an industrial plastics factory in the eighties, and now, in its senility, the house has once more become a home.
And as Manny and Hugh cross the courtyard together, the empty black eyes of the derelict building look down on them, welcoming them back at the end of their day.