Terminus

Aimlessly wandering the Wirral, staring into the void

My first night in England, I had a dream about my mother. She had long black hair and eyes that glinted with mischief. She was naked. A huge, monster of a man dragged her at the end of a rope tied around her neck. He led her into a clearing in the woods where there was a pile of branches and twigs. The man-monster tied my mother to a tree and lit the bonfire. I woke up as she started to scream.

I decided to leave London the next morning. I wanted protection from my bad dreams. I was sure the caring presence of Nanna and Daddo would help. The train traveled north. The clouds in the sky grew heavy, sheets of grey rain slanted down, and the passing hills and towns became smudges of ink. I read the scene in Crime and Punishment in which Raskolnikov dreams he is a little boy, watching a peasant flog his horse to death. According to my father, D.H. Lawrence had once called Dostoevsky “the rat” who was forever “slithering along in hate.” I loved Dostoevsky even more for this description.

Young men boarded at Birmingham New Street, sat down, pulled out playing cards, and started a game. I forced my eyes to stay fixed on the window. The grimy city rolled by slowly. A crevasse opened up in the clouds, a long passageway to a deep-blue place. As I attempted to enter a peaceful, contemplative mood, my stomach shifted weirdly, and then something warm and wet seemed to push against my seat.

One of the card players sniffed.

I had shit myself.

Only the narrow pane of window-glass separated me from the fresh air. I wished I could throw myself out to freedom. I decided to let my face muscles slacken and become downcast and despondent, and then I peered back to the card players to show them just how depressed I felt — how much I hated myself. Perhaps they would take pity on me. Between the evidence of the shit in my boxers and my grim face, they’d know I was not a normal person. I was mentally unwell.

No one moved and no one spoke. The card players exchanged looks with each other, as if communicating telepathically. I started to feel angry. Didn’t they realize how ashamed I felt for having shit myself? It wasn’t a joke. I took it deadly seriously. I knew very well that to shit oneself on a crowded train was an outrage.

Abruptly I swept up to my feet, asking the young man to my right if he would excuse me. “Hang on, hang on,” he said. I was rushing him. All the card players were looking at me. I pushed past and into the aisle. I hurried to the coffin-sized space between the carriages, grabbing on to the walls to steady myself. I found the bathroom. I tried the door handle and it wouldn’t turn. I went over to the window and opened the latch. I poked my head out, despite the sign that had warned against doing exactly this. RISK OF INJURY OR DEATH said the sign.

I gasped hungrily. The air smelled like wet trees.

I marched back to the bathroom door. This time the handle turned. The bathroom had been free all along. I entered the private room, closed the door, and conducted a thorough inspection of my underwear.

There was no shit to be found — not even a smear.

*

When the train arrived at the end of the line, in Liverpool, I waited in the bathroom until I was sure that everyone had exited, including the card players. Then I went back to my seat and found my diary and my copy of Crime and Punishment. I gathered them up, shoved them into my backpack, and jumped down to the platform.

Nanna was waiting for me. She was wearing a formal winter coat with bronze-coloured buttons. Her eyes narrowed as she scrutinized me.

“You look like your mother,” she said.

I wanted to embrace her but there was a guardedness to her demeanour that dissuaded me. She made a comment about how enormous my backpack was, marveling that I could lug around such a heavy burden. Then she started to walk at a brisk pace across the station toward the signs that said MERSEYRAIL. I asked her where we were going. She said we needed to take a local train so that we could cross the River Mersey and get to the Wirral. Didn’t I remember this from when I was a child? No, I did not, I told her.

“What’s the Wirral?” I asked.

“It’s where we live, dear,” she said.

“Is it part of Liverpool?”

“I don’t know the official answer to that, dear. It’s the Wirral. It’s where we’ve always lived.”

She trotted down the steps into the underground part of the station. A yellow train wheezed in and the doors swung open. When we sat down, Nanna asked me questions about Canada. Her accent was very particular. She tried very hard to speak correct English — BBC English — but an Irish undertow still tugged at her words. I answered her questions as best as I could, telling her I had graduated from high school, that my hobbies included theatre, writing, reading, and playing tennis with my friend Gareth. The volume of questions made it seem like an interrogation. Didn’t she trust me? We were related by blood, and yet she hadn’t even embraced me.

We arrived at Wallasey Village Station. Daylight had drained from the sky while we’d been burrowing underneath the Mersey. We walked past tightly packed houses, an unbroken line of containers for other lives — some of the windows yellow with light, and some black with darkness. Nanna took out her key when we arrived at the house on Knowsley Road. Indoors, the air seemed even more brisk than outside.

Daddo was lying in bed upstairs. He looked cheerful, but his skin was very pale, and his thinning hair seemed almost translucent. Attached to the headboard of his bed was a string that led to a bell in the hallway. Seeing me glance at it, he explained that he rang the bell for Nanna; that’s how she attended to his needs. He then asked me how old I was, and I told him I’d recently turned eighteen. He nodded, as if approvingly. Then his attention went back to Nanna, asking how long it would be before supper. She said she was going to prepare supper right away, and then led me back downstairs. My visit with Daddo was over.

“Why don’t you amuse yourself with a bit of television?” said Nanna, and showed me into the living room.

I watched the news while she cooked in the adjacent kitchen, which was so tiny it could only accommodate her perambulations. The trial of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables had opened. Earlier that year, the boys — then just ten years old — had murdered an even younger boy, James Bulger, aged two. Bulger had slipped away from his mother at the New Strand Shopping Centre in Liverpool and, within seconds, was kidnapped. Thompson and Venables took the boy on a walk of over two miles, during which time they dropped him on his head, kicked him in the ribs, stuffed batteries into his mouth, beat him to death, and left him on the train tracks. His body was cut in half by a locomotive.

Nanna suddenly appeared in the doorway and looked at the television. The screen showed the grainy CCTV footage from New Strand Shopping Centre. Bulger was holding the hand of one of his assailants, being led away. He must have thought they were all going somewhere to play a fun game. Nanna told me sharply to turn off the television. It was an unbearable case, an outright horror, she said.

“My heart aches for the parents,” she said, and wiped a tear from the corner of her eye. “Supper’s ready, dear. Do you want to come and get it while I take Daddo his?”

She had prepared a large bowl of soup, two thick slices of toast, sausage and beans. I sat at a table next to the kitchen and ate, alone. When I was finished, I put everything in the sink. I went outside into the back garden and rapidly smoked a cigarette halfway down. When I came inside again, I immediately heard Nanna call out to me from upstairs.

“Do you want to talk to Daddo?” she said.

I dutifully complied, went upstairs, and sat next to Daddo’s bed on one of the tattered armchairs. Nanna perched at the foot of the bed on a small stool. Daddo’s dinner was half-eaten on a tray on the side table. My eyes were drawn again to the string for the bell.

“It’s a very natty invention, don’t you think?” he said.

I nodded, to be agreeable.

“How are you getting on, then?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m very happy to be here.”

“You don’t sound like a Canadian,” he said.

“I moved to Canada when I was fourteen,” I said.

“Oh really? I thought it was much earlier.”

I shook my head.

“Fourteen,” I reiterated.

“Well then, you’re a Brit. Not a Canadian. You’re one of us. How tall are you?”

“Just under six feet.”

“That’s a good height. Do you play rugby or football?”

“Neither,” I admitted.

Nanna intervened.

“Eliot is an artistic boy, like Virginia was,” she said.

“Oh really?” said Daddo. “Are you a poet?”

“No, I like to act.”

“So, a performer.”

“Yes, I guess.”

“Ha! I guess. That’s a very North American way of putting it.” This seemed to cause him considerable amusement. “Will you go on to study drama at acting school?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe you should,” he said, insistently.

“I think you should,” Nanna chimed in. “At university, your father persuaded Virginia to choose philosophy over music, and I think that was a mistake. Philosophy just confuses certain kinds of minds. Virginia had a talent for singing. It was such a shame she couldn’t use it.”

I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t used to people talking about my mother as a person with talents and interests — a life. I felt I was a disappointment to them both, having made no bold declaration for what I wanted from the future. I had to rectify this, somehow. I had to make it clear I wanted to live.

“What I most love is writing,” I said.

“That’s marvellous!” Nanna exclaimed. “What do you write?”

“I’ve been trying to write a play.”

“So not a poet, but a playwright,” said Daddo.

“I want to dedicate my first play to the memory of my mother,” I said. This was an idea I had just invented on the spot. I saw Nanna’s face darken, and I turned to Daddo, and he looked winded.

“Is that appropriate?” said Nanna. “You’re not planning on writing about her, are you?”

“No, no,” I said.

“You can’t write about her,” said Daddo. “You hardly knew her!”

He laughed humourlessly.

“It would just be to pay my respects,” I said. Tears were threatening, and I had to swallow hard to keep them down.

“Well, it’s a nice gesture,” said Nanna, and forced a smile to her lips. “Let’s leave Daddo alone now. You’re quite tired, aren’t you, Daddo?”

He nodded slowly.

“Yes, I’m afraid I’m a bit feeble these days.”

*

“I didn’t tell you — the bedroom you’re in was your mother’s room,” said Nanna at bedtime.

The nearest streetlight peered in insistently, like a curious moon. When I turned back to Nanna, I could hardly make her out. Her head was a black oblong.

“Good night, angel,” she said.

“Good night, Nanna,” I replied, and closed my door.

I undressed and set Crime and Punishment on my pillow to read into the night. Then I reopened the wardrobe where Nanna had instructed me to hang my clothes. I pulled the pack of cigarettes out of my anorak pocket, and broke the remaining six cigarettes in half, then in half again. I was left with little white bullets that bounced around in their box. I dropped the box into the waste paper basket in the corner of the room. Watching me unwaveringly was Jesus, who hung from the crucifix over the bed.

I read to the halfway mark of Crime and Punishment. Suddenly, it was four in the morning. I told myself it was unhealthy to persist so long without sleep. I closed my eyes and willed my mind to be still, but I had no way of restraining it. I sat up again. My mother’s bedroom window wore a lace curtain that had become sepia coloured. I stared, and the streetlight outside made it shimmer and glow like a halo.

At six o’clock, I opened my door and saw Daddo in the hallway. I had not realized he was even capable of standing unassisted. He had just come out of the door adjacent to mine — a door that previously had been closed, as if permanently.

“Eliot!” he whispered. “Just the man I was looking for. Look at this!”

He opened his hand. Inside was a bronze-coloured Zippo lighter, the same kind I used to sell from Stubble and Guts in West Edmonton Mall.

“If you’re going to smoke,” he said, “you might as well have a nice lighter. This was your mother’s.”

He handed it over, his arm faintly trembling. How long had he been in the room next to mine? I hadn’t heard him move about. Had I nodded off without realizing it? I thanked him, looked closely at the lighter, and noticed the engraved initials: V.A.G.

“What does the ‘A’ stand for?” I said.

“You don’t know your mother’s full name?” he said.

“Virginia Gallagher. No one ever told me she had a middle name.”

“Her middle name was Amy,” he said. “We gave both our girls middle names. We didn’t skimp out on the names!”

“Of course not,” I said, still shaken by the fact of him being there, and standing so close to me. He was very thin. The ends of his legs, planted in his big dust-coloured slippers, were like poster tubes.

Abruptly he broke away from me.

“I must get back to bed,” he said. “The air of that room has made me feel a little faint.”

The door to the bedroom he shared with Nanna opened and closed, and he disappeared. I chose to not peek inside. I simply kept walking in the direction I’d been headed in, to the bathroom. Inside, I finished my business and then sat on the toilet seat and inspected my inheritance. When I flicked the Zippo, no flame came out. I pulled it apart and smelled fuel — dried up remains from prehistory.

*

At breakfast, Nanna gave me a map of Liverpool and told me to enjoy my day in the city. She warned me that the map didn’t extend into the Wirral, and so it wouldn’t be of much use in navigating to Wallasey Village Station, but I’d already made that walk with her, so surely I would remember the way?

I didn’t like being shooed out of the house. I had barely even eaten my scrambled eggs and toast. The day ahead gaped open like a cave. I politely thanked Nanna for the map. She gave me advice on what to see in Liverpool — the waterfront, the Royal Liver Building and the Cavern Club on Mathew Street, where the Beatles used to play.

As soon as I was outside, I rummaged into the bottom of my jeans pocket. I had stowed away a few of my broken cigarette-bullets from the night before. My mother’s lighter didn’t work and so I asked a passerby for a match. After a few puffs, I had strands of tobacco in my mouth and an acrid taste on my tongue. I threw the butt into the gutter. I stopped at the first newsagents I saw and marched straight to the counter and asked for a pack of Silk Cut, my mother’s brand. The clerk said, “Sorry, love, I’ve run out.”

I turned away quickly so the clerk wouldn’t see my reaction — how my face felt as if it was going to collapse. I continued walking, my route seeming to follow a gradual incline downwards. The terraced housing hemmed me in on all sides, and I couldn’t see if I was walking toward the Mersey, or maybe toward the Irish Sea. I couldn’t recall if this was the route back to the train station.

Another newsagents appeared, and I walked in. The clerk was adding up the bill, using a pencil and a piece of paper, while the customer watched. There was no cash register or even a calculator on the counter. I glanced over to the newspapers and the magazines. My eyes flitted upward to the pornography and then back down again. I reached down for a copy of The Independent, a respectable broadsheet newspaper. I saw the clerk had finished with the customer and I approached him with my newspaper and asked him for a pack of Silk Cuts.

He looked behind him at the tobacco wall, and then back to me.

“Sorry, son, I don’t have any.”

The clerk’s face appraised me coolly and calculatingly, waiting for me to hand over the requisite money for the newspaper. I gave him a one-pound coin, took my change, and walked back to the street. How could it be that, in the neighbourhood in which my mother had grown up, her brand of cigarettes were nowhere to be found?

I arrived, by accident, at Wallasey Village Station. I climbed a long flight of steps. At the top of the steps was the brick wall of the train station building. Affixed to the wall was a large poster of a ticket conductor looking stern, his arms folded, glaring right at me. The poster said:

DO NOT TAKE THE TRAIN FOR A RIDE

There was no one in the vicinity, no one to notice me reading and re-reading the poster. Then I turned around and walked back down the steps. I would obey the poster. I would accept my place on this side of the Mersey.

I continued walking along the main road. I passed another newsagents. I went inside. There were no customers at all, just a tall, thin woman behind the till. My mouth tingled with my question and the anticipation of another rejection.

“A pack of Silk Cut, please,” I said.

“Here you go, love,” she said, handing over a pack that was purple and white.

My confidence grew. I reached into the big jar of gobstoppers on the counter and pulled one out.

“This, too, please,” I said.

“Anything else you fancy, love?”

Only to be embraced by her — by this woman who had saved my morning and called me love. I handed over a crisp five-pound note.

“Have a wonderful day,” she said, as I turned to leave.

I popped the gobstobber into my mouth as I marched onward through the Wirral, taking a random combination of turns through the streets. The gobstopper melted down to the size of a lentil. I arrived at another large road. Rain started to spit down and the trees drooped, as if in mourning. The gobstopper disappeared completely. My burst of confidence from the purchase of cigarettes was vanishing. I was becoming a wet stray at the side of a busy road. I needed somewhere to shelter where I could calm my nerves with a pint, lay my broadsheet paper over a table, and read and smoke in peace. A pub would have served my needs, but there was no pub in sight. Even the houses were becoming sparse.

I decided to take shelter in a commercial nursery. There was a pathway at the front marked out by a small row of conifer trees, each about a foot shorter than me. In the spaces between the conifers I could see piles of bags of turf piled up in an organized mound, and a table full of potted poinsettias, and large carousel-style rack, from which were small implements hanging — trowels and secateurs. I heard the growling of a mechanical engine, and then saw the forklift responsible turning around the corner of a stack of palettes. The driver — a bearded man — stopped the forklift and jumped down.

“Can I help you?”

It seemed impossible to keep him from seeing my aimlessness. I wanted just one final effort from my face: for it to not appear shifty, like the face of a shoplifter.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not from here. I’m lost. I’m looking for a quiet place to read my paper.”

I held up The Independent so he could see that I was not playing a prank.

“A quiet place? I don’t know about that. If you go back to the main road and keep going west, you’ll get to the golf course.”

He jumped back up to his forklift.

The rain had stopped, but the clouds were still stalled, blotting out the sky in an endless traffic jam. Beside me, the cars, vans and trucks hissed, their wheels slick on the wet road. I walked until the pavement dipped in an arc around what seemed to be a layby, in the centre of which was an open manhole. I approached the edge of the manhole and looked down. I wanted to jump. I hoped that nobody would interfere with my plan. I remembered the BBC News story about James Bulger. Crying and bleeding, he had been seen by thirty-eight different passersby in the company of his captors. The odds were even more in my favour. No car was going to stop for me. When my dead body was discovered I’d be covered in shit and piss, which was no less than I deserved. I had proven, yet again, that I was a failure at life. I couldn’t even take the train to Liverpool, couldn’t curb my smoking habit, had no more than a handful of memories of my mother, and was a joke and a fraud in the eyes of Nanna and Daddo.

I put my hand into my jeans pocket where I had stowed the Zippo lighter. I lifted the lighter’s lid and tried again to spark a flame. I told myself, if I get a flame, I’ll keep on living. If not, I’ll jump.

A small, yellow orb darted out. I was startled. I suspected my eyes of tricking me. The light must be coming from somewhere else. A driver had perhaps flashed his high-beams as a warning to not stand so close to the manhole. But no, it really was the Zippo that was making the light. I hurriedly pulled a cigarette from the pack and held it to the flame.

*

I found the way back to Knowsley Road. Nanna made me an Irish coffee and we had dinner together. I went to bed. I stared at the halo made by the streetlight peering through the lace curtain, and I didn’t sleep. I listened to Pink Floyd on my Walkman.

In the morning, Nanna took me with her on the bus to where my mother was buried. The clouds had retreated from the Wirral and the sky was perfect. The graveyard was full of vibrant life — the lush green of the grass and the fresh flowers that visitors had left for their loved ones. I kneeled in front of the small tombstone, Nanna looking on. I cried gently and peacefully.

After a few minutes, the tears dried themselves, and I stood up.

“Doesn’t that feel better?” said Nanna.

NOTES

This was the second work of fiction I’ve posted here. The first, in case you missed it, was “Deepfake.”

The photo in this post is of the Royal Liver Building, in Liverpool.