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| A Day on the Estate | |
| By sam_duke | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| 05 June 2007 | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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Short stories is probably the wrong category for this, but I beg you to indulge me. This is part of a much larger work written quite some time ago. Whenever I try to read this back, I'm so overcome with all the flaws and all the weaknesses in it that I can't actually pinpoint what they are. All the same, without knowing much what came before or after, take a look and see what you think. It had all been on my mind for long enough. All the questions, all the thoughts, none of the answers; it all went on. On another day much later that long and hot summer, I was walking up an empty road, my head hanging to the floor, kicking a stone along the ground with the same foot. Nobody was around, whether walking their dogs or taking a stroll, or standing at their gates chatting to the passer-by they might have known. Through the windows of the frowning redbrick houses, each one built the same as the last, the glare of a television screen was the only flicker of life. Sometimes there was a police car hollering its sirens in the distance, or someone’s voice shouting off a curse. But other than that, there was nothing. The place seemed drained of its life. It was a Monday morning. There was no sun, and the skies were a blanket of grey, yet still it was hot and stifling. Outside, the smell of burning was wafting through the thick midsummer air, whilst the only sound was the drone of the elements, a ghostly noise like an echo, as if what was natural and what was human had all disappeared or at once been destroyed. I can remember that sound well, now that I think back. I remember the sounds and the sights and the smells, yet it is only they that remind me of my thoughts, what was on my mind, what was in my heart, as though one were crafting the other. But there and then, the world around me and the world inside were just a mess, confused, a mass of wondering, doubting, fearing, worrying, thinking, feeling, and only every now and then hoping and dreaming. I had to get out of the house. A couple of days before, I’d been out to the shops to buy a pair of grey dress trousers and some jet-black shoes for school, and then to my grandma’s just to see what she was cooking. But other than that, I’d done nothing at all but pain my forehead with everything on my mind. I couldn’t think any more. I couldn’t feel. Or at least whenever I began to think and feel, I thought so much and felt it all that the thoughts and feelings made me ache. I had been reading, but the words suddenly meant nothing to me for some reason. I’d listened to some music, but the songs were just noise that made me sore. I would sit somewhere, or drift from wall to wall, and whisper my thoughts, and sometimes even write them down for when they came to mind they were a jumble, and nobody was ever around to hear them or make sense of them. Sometimes I tried to close my eyes, but then I would hear it all. I would hear the chronic thud of the music the girl next door was playing, or the laughing and the hollering of the kids running up and down in the rotten garden on the other side, or the violent barking of the dogs down the road. I could hear it all, and see it all, and feel it all, so my senses had grown all but numb. I thought the fresh air would do me good. I’d been stuck at home for too long, wasting away in that tiny, sweaty, reeking bedroom, its walls papered clumsily, its carpet threadbare, and its only light coming from a bulb dangling by a wire fixed to the ceiling. Every other room was just the same, only louder and harsher. My dad would be asleep next door most of the time, groaning and whinging through the day, for he worked nights as a security guard at an industrial works somewhere near the town centre. Sometimes he’d be downstairs in the living room that smelt of ironing and was strewn with shirts and soiled underwear that needed putting away and bills that needed paying, its walls covered in holes and patches where pictures used to hang. He’d be slumped in his chair, drinking from his tin and smoking his last tab-end, or feeding at the leftovers from lunch the day before, scratching the stubble clinging to his face, playing with the hairs up his nose, watching the racing and shouting and swearing at the television. He was only a gaunt man with a squawking voice, but still he was loud. The plasterboard walls were only thin, so I could hear him all the time, shouting again and again. Whenever someone’s feet smacked the ground, the floorboards all creaked. When someone slammed the doors, the house would shudder, as if it could feel what I felt too. My mum might have been there too, sprawled on the settee looking through her holiday brochures, eating a bag of crisps because she felt too tired and too pained to cook anything in that tiny kitchen next door, with its microwave that was always broken, its floor sticky, its ceiling stained yellow and its sink unit that built up some acrid stench in the summer. She might have been yelling at him for making the house a mess, or leaving the toilet in a state, or accusing him of going off with another woman when he’d been drinking. Or she might have been waddling upstairs to bed early too, panting and coughing for she’d been sick and low lately, her body always aching, the matted dark hair of her head falling sorry to her back, her sore hands holding up her dirtied, draggle-tailed skirt, her face scarlet and her breaths hard and heavy. And all the while, I stayed on my own. I just walked up and down, sometimes drifting over to the window to see the cluttered yet bare garden at the back where nothing ever grew other than the grass and the moss, and to the drab parkland beyond, and all the ordered ribs of creaking houses just like ours that lined the horizon, wondering what it all meant, trying to make sense of it, just for once. It had all been on my mind for long enough, why it all had to be this way, and it made me feel sick. I was angry, but I was sad. When I saw the world for what it was it made my head ache and my heart turn. The three of us lived at Number 47 Brimley Avenue, a quiet spot on the road that led straight to the centre of the estate. Downcast faces drifted by every now and then, and cars flew past them. But other than that it was always silent, always drained of its life. The street delved from the edge of the district right into the Parklands, as the terraces and avenues at the core of the whole place were known. The whole area they called Nyedale. That was the name coined for the vast region of council houses built in those parts to the east of Leeds after the Second World War, concreting over all the small villages and communities that had belonged before and replacing them with one giant mass. The ward stretched about five miles north and south between Wetherby Road and York Road, and roughly the same east and west between the just as rough redbrick inner cities like Gipton and Harehills and the gentler suburbs like Cross Gates and Manston. Nobody knew where the name came from. There was no River Nye. It was sometimes said, perhaps as a yarn, perhaps not, that it was a tribute to Aneurin Bevan himself, one of the politicians who came along and built these houses which had so long been falling down. “A bit like Leningrad,” some people joked, though not very many. It was hard to joke about much in those parts. Whenever anyone spoke of Nyedale, they never had much to be glad about. The police and the firemen marked it down as a ‘no-go area’ long ago. The schools were falling down, and the only jobs to be had were on the check-outs up at the supermarket or cleaning the toilets at the old people’s home nearby. The streets were littered with carrier bags and trolleys and lager tins and shards of glass from smashed bottles. The houses were ramshackle and the blocks of flats were worse. There were guns and knives and drugs, but we didn’t have it as bad as it was in some parts. But all those just seemed like the symptoms. It had begun to feel as if there was something wrong with it all that went far further and far deeper. We’d lived there on Number 47 for as long as I could remember, just the three of us. We kept ourselves to ourselves for the most part, and most of the rest around did too. We hadn’t a lot of money, but we didn’t spend very much either. We didn’t have any friends or family in distant parts we might visit, nor did we fete anyone for some special day. If ever we went out it was only to my grandma’s house a few streets away, for she liked to have a party once in a while for someone’s birthday or at Christmas. We didn’t get anywhere else for not only didn’t have the cash; we hadn’t that kind of community either. We lived alone, separate, isolated, even within our own houses, imprisoned by those four walls that would attract the damp in the winter but feel too stifling in the summer. It was just the same for everyone else down our street and about the estate too. And besides, when the darkness came about those streets, so did the drugs, and the drunks, and the fights, the kids who’d kicked a dent in our gate not long ago, the thugs who’d broken in to our tiny garage outside just before that. Most of us left were too scared to go out. And when it was light, all that there was to see was the miserable, dirty emptiness, the filthy, lifeless streets and the never-blue sky above which seemed to go on forever. And there and then I wanted to know why. Suddenly it didn’t seem right to me any more. I wanted to know why it was like this, but not only that, I was sure it could be, it should be, it had to be made better than this. We didn’t really know anyone down the street. At Number 49 there was just a young girl and her mother, though they didn’t step out much, as if they were frightened too. On the other side, at Number 45, there was a couple and their two kids who were always playing about, jumping on the roof of their battered car or inside the hulking caravan they kept in their driveway. The man of the house was timid and hardly ever spoke a word himself, but the woman made up for it. She was always shouting her mouth off, always standing by the door with a cigarette between her thick fingers, her hair dyed red one week and blonde the next. Their garden was strewn with toys and litter, ragged dogs and cats and the friends and foes they dragged back home. “Look at that!” my mother would say whenever she was peering through the net curtains, catching one of them throwing a fag to the ground or their kids fighting on the driveway. “They’re rough as shit!” But that Monday morning, none of them were around. Over the road, at Number 46, the semi facing ours, the family, the Barrowcloughs, had been away for a couple of weeks in a chalet at Primrose Valley near Filey. I knew them better than most down the street. They were all decent folk, but I knew the daughter, Jade, best of all. She was my age, a small, thin, nervous girl. She used to get bullied at school, because she only ever wanted to just do with her work, do what she had to do, and get on in life. She didn’t want to be like her older brother, getting drunk of a weekend, walking the streets all the rest of the time, glancing through the job pages in the ‘Evening Post’ every Thursday but nothing more. She wanted better than that. She didn’t fight and shout and swear. But she was shy and easy to scare too, so the bullies always had their way. She was lovely though. She had such soft dark hair, an enchanting celestial face and a tiny beauty spot on her cheek. When she smiled, she looked divine, her visage at last giving an image to display the delicacy of all that was inside her. We used to get together a lot, just talking about whatever was on our minds for hours on end. We couldn’t afford to go out to town very much, so more often than not we’d pop up to Lidl for a bag of peas and have a Cornish pasty from the musty bakery next door. Every now and then we’d skip school together as well, just so we could pass the days in our own little world, with no one else to hurt us. But over time she’d been growing up. She was moving on, finding new friends and going out with them to the clubs, leaving me behind for she knew it wasn’t my thing. She seemed happier, at least. It was probably for the best. But it had left me all alone. And as every day passed I’d begun to see deeper, to reflect yet more than I ever had. I would come home every day and my parents would be rowing with one another, with the frustration of a ramshackle house to cope with, bills to pay which they couldn’t afford, my dad yelling at my mum to make her shut up because he was knackered after his hard day at work and she was doing his head in with her nagging. Life seemed like existence, something which every depressed face on the street just had to get through. Now I was on my own, I’d begun to see deeper, yet there was nothing I could do. I had to set myself apart from the world if I were to understand it all, to see the whole picture. But I had to be a part of it myself were I to know what the thoughts and the feelings of all the players on the canvas really were. So I left the house that Monday morning, offering to take my mother’s order books to the post office at the top of Jewett Road, a lane that cut across Brimley Avenue a few yards along, to collect her benefits. I took a left after a couple more doors, following the line of more houses just like ours. It was still dull and murky, stifling hot in the air yet sheet grey in the sky. Some of the windows of the semis up there were smashed, some of the gates were mangled, some of the scraggy dogs were howling as if they were dying under the strain of the heat, and a car on the grass verge halfway along had been burnt out. All of a sudden an ice cream van rumbled on by. The man inside didn’t sell much of the stuff, but instead made his real money selling cigarettes for thirty pence a pop to the kids who demanded them. When he passed he switched on a jingle which sounded somehow chilling amidst the wreckage of the estate and the emptiness of air so devoid of even the most elemental sound, as if all humanity and all nature had been drained away. The road was on an upward incline, and must have been around a third of a mile in length. At the end were half a dozen blocks of council flats looming high over an enclosure of sheltered housing and a communal garage which had been vandalized, covered with graffiti spray-painted in black and blue. Behind them was a patch of land that had for the most part become overgrown, the grass uncut and the soil full of weeds. There was just one old man out there, leaning on his spade at his allotment, watching the world go slowly, listlessly by, casting his gaze across those dark satanic mills, maybe wondering too how it had become like this. Finally there were the shops, a terrace of redbricks on a T-junction looking down Jewett Road. At one end there was a small fish and chip shop which reeked of grease and fat but which made a nicer meal than the one at the Parklands end of Brimley Avenue. There was a sad-looking young woman with a child, both of them eating chips out of a carton with a thin wooden fork. She was staring somewhere into the distance, into the terrible grey sky, but the young lad watched me as I drifted by. The lights were on in the butcher’s, though Jim Clegg didn’t have much business that day. At the other end was the post office, with a queue starting to slip outside the door, mostly of old folk there to collect their pension. I stepped over the dried remnants of someone’s vomit that had ground into the cracked pavement since the night before, and joined the line.
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