After work, I said to Kit, “Let’s climb Breast Mountain. Come on, it’ll be quality.” From our window, the hill looked rubbery in the shimmering heat. “Come on, we’ll take the cider; we’ll watch the sunset.” It was one of those rare hot days, when radios play outdoors and men in shorts wash cars. Parents cleaned mud from paddling pools. Sweaty kids rested bikes against shady walls. In the sunshine, teenage girls lazed in bikini tops, wearing beach towels like sarongs.
Breast Mountain was a sort of no man’s land. It was a border zone between city and country, between this time and the past. Weeds colonised bags of sand and gravel. Slugs burrowed in the slashed foam seat of an abandoned JCB. A woodpigeon took off, exploding balsam pods and downing helicopters as it beat through the branches of a sycamore tree. We crawled through a gap in the fence, ran through nettles—hands up so they didn’t get stung—and then we followed the old train line to where it met the canal.
The canal was filled with bottles and overrun by chickweed; you could fall into it if you didn’t know it was there. The mooring bollards were camouflaged in the undergrowth, and rosebay willow-herb sprouted purple through the loading stage. A bit of everything that ever happened in Dundule was buried here. Refrigerators were dug into the hillside, and burned out cages of cars were charred with rust. There was a roofless warehouse, layered with graffiti, and an industrial chimney stack, poking through a tumble of its own bricks. There were limestone steps curved by generations of walking, and overlooking it all, the big wheel of Brandon Colliery remained suspended, still in the sky.
The “Mountain” was a conical slag heap half-covered with hogweed and docken. Your feet left impressions in the rubble, as if you were climbing a sand dune. Kit told me that she once had sex on the far side, near the bottom, where the gorse bushes had found enough soil to grow. I told her that I smoked my first joint at the top; I recalled leaning back to watch the street lights shiver over Dundule, pretending I was having fun. We agreed that neither extreme skiers nor ice climbers know the risks of sledging Breast Mountain on a plastic tray.
But from the bottom, we could see that a group of boys had already claimed the summit. They were shouting and kicking each other and laughing and acting angry and kicking each other and laughing again. Their shirts were open and they stared razoreyed into the sunshine. Bottles of Becks flashed in their hands. We stopped and waited for a minute, not yet ready for home but not sure what else to do. That’s the thing with these rare hot days: everybody agrees you must make the most of the weather, but nobody’s sure how. The beer dehydrates us, the sun burns our shoulders, the insects crawl on our picnics; by five o’clock, the day has betrayed us.
6
“What d’you make of that new guy? I think he’s mental.”
“Who?” said Buzz. “That Doddy guy?”
“The cunt wi the stutter?” asked Gordon.
“Nah, no him. That guy with the glasses.”
“...”
“...”
“He started about a month ago. The fucking Star Trek guy.”
“Oh, that cunt,” said Gordon.
“That guy’s funny,” said Buzz.
“Funny? He’s fucking lazy.”
“He takes no shit.”
“Ever since he’s started, I’ve kept finding him hiding in The Cave.”
“It’s always the same mugs dae aw the work,” said Gordon, shaking his head.
We were in the Railway Arms, Jerry the Fence’s pub, where two years earlier, Gordon had introduced me to Deanne. The Railway was a dingy bar with long burgundy curtains and nicotine-stained walls. The leather upholstery on the wooden benches was tough and cracked like the surface of cricket balls. The air was always so thick with smoke and dust that you imagined you were exploring a new planet, whose alien atmosphere might not support life. Guarding a half of cider in the lounge area, a bag lady attempted to initiate conversations with real and imagined passers by. Alcoholic Tam crashed between tables, singing “What a Wonderful World.” And an old man hunched over a horse racing paper, his pipe unlit as his half of eighty evaporated. The only other customer, a stocky Teddy Boy, stood fumbling and cursing at the jukebox. “Whose round is it?” I asked.
“It’s true,” said Buzz. “We do that much work and get no reward. Like, remember that all-night close last week? Man, we were there till when? Like, ten o’clock the next morning. What did they promise us? Twenty quid each, yeah? Check your pay slips. Seriously guys, it’s not there.” Buzz’s glasses were held together with Sellotape and his jumper belonged to someone older and fatter; even by the standards of the Railway Arms, even next to a bag lady obese with layers of clothes, Buzz managed to look noticeably unkempt.
“I got the last one,” I said.
“Well, fuckin, yous both owe me drinks,” said Gordon.
“And it keeps happening. D’you remember the extra shifts when Andy Duke came from head office?”
“Oh aye, fifteen bar I shouldae got for that.”
“It’s your round, Buzz.”
“Damnit man,” he said, kicking back his stool.
The setting sun poked through the windows, illuminating the swirling clouds of smoke and dust, spearing a shaft of light towards the old pipe smoker. I never saw anyone die in the Railway Arms, but that being remarkable tells you it wasn’t the sort of place where you went to pick up girls or have fun. “There’s other places for that sort of thing,” Deborah, the bartender, used to say if anyone sang or fought or danced or kissed.
As she poured our drinks, the old Teddy Boy touched me on the shoulder with fingers that had swollen around gold signet rings. “Gie me a hand wi this, son.” Maybe he’d had a stroke at some time because one quarter of his pockmarked face was frozen, with the corner of his mouth held down in a way that made you think of a sad clown. “I’m a bit shaky, shaky,” he said, pushing fifty pence into my hand. “Elvis, son. Elvis and one for yersel.” I selected the Elvis CD and invited him to pick, but he looked tired from standing and sat down beside the jukebox. “Anything son. Anything by Elvis.” I was unsure what to play but I chose “Hound Dog” and “Jailhouse Rock,” and I chose “Tubthumping” for myself. The Teddy Boy closed his eyes, tapped his foot, and hummed.
Meanwhile, Buzz lowered a triangle of pints and slapped on the table four pound notes, eighty-six pence, and a sweaty bus ticket. “Guys, it’s six o’clock on payday, and in a few hours I’m going to be skint.”
“We should huv a union,” said Gordon, and we all laughed.
“You know that Doddy with the stutter? New guy, been trained on chicken?”
“Oh aye.”
“He was saying that he used to work on this building site where they had a union.”
“Oh fuck,” I said, “he told me the same story. It takes the guy fifteen minutes to tell you his name. ‘We had a you-you-you, a you-you-you, a youn—a youn—’ It’s embarrassing; you dinnae ken whether to finish his sentences or what.”
Gordon laughed. “And?”
“Well,” said Buzz, “that was it, really. They had a health and safety officer and got paid five-fifty an hour with time-and-a-half for overtime.”
“Cause of the union?”
“So he reckons.”
“Nah, see, the question I asked him was this: if the job was so great, how come he’s not still working there?” Gordon nodded at the salience of this inquiry. “And he says, ‘Cause I got