When Night Again Meets Day on Equal Terms

TILL NIGHT AGAIN MEETS DAY ON EQUAL TERMS

On those days the water returned. It bounced and flowed across the wild grasses. It pounded the old stone wall. Spume and spray rose into the air. The grassy twiggy abodes of the nesting birds were washed away, and the rats were swept under the promenade to enter the piping and the inner runnels of the old houses. That night I looked across the water to the dim lights of Bagillt, far away and crouching on the shoreline. Now a man could swim all the way to Wales. It happened twice a year.

I turned back to shore. A couple were entwined under a street lamp, and the wind and the lights and the waves were throwing their shadows into the water. Apart from the three of us the street was empty. This was once a great place from where the rich and famous sailed not just to Wales but distant Dublin too. Then this street would have been awash with salons and bordellos and any manner of fancy place that looked better than it was. Now the old whitewashed sea captains’ houses stand silent of a night. The fishermen have gone too, although a couple of little shops hang on selling shrimps of anonymous provenance in thin white paper bags.

You cannot run a quay that only floats on the equinox. New channels drove the waters round the top of the peninsula and a little place across the other river took our trade. It was called Liverpool. They were water diviners hexing the currents- devious Scouse bastards. I was going to meet one tonight. The pub across the promenade looked dark and comforting and that was where I was heading. It was kind of a second home to me at that time, up till then at least, the best pub in town and the only one that still gave some hint of how things once might have been in old West Wirral.

I turned up the collar of my coat and walked hunched across the road. It was the way I walked into pubs back then, some sort of statement of intent. Cas was at the bar talking to Becs. It wasn’t him I had come to see. He was around often enough. He had a law firm somewhere off Dale Street and he was not the nice sort of solicitor who applied legal aid and comfort to those who had slipped through life’s interstices. He preyed on the failing public sector. He acted for outsourcers and asset strippers and helped tidy up old blocks of flats that still suffered from human habitation.

Becs poured me a glass of ale and winked as she handed it to me. Then she left to serve someone else. I leant back against the bar with my elbows on it and looked around to see if there was anyone I could temporarily have a natter with. There wasn’t but it did not matter. I loved this place though I was hardly noticing the homely lamplit scruffiness, so familiar was I with it. Cas was talking to me but I had stopped listening. At least I could make up yarns about his business chicanery but the last word I’d heard had been Everton and that did it for me.

“Gary, old son, how ya doing?”

And there was Degger. I hadn’t seen him come in but now he was standing right next to me. I’d heard a rumour he was crossing the water for the March equinox. Degger’s whole life was a rumour but things like that mattered to him. He looked older and not quite the man he was but still big enough. Degger was a legend and everybody wanted to be seen with him. Cas had stopped talking about Everton but Degger was still joshing me. I think he liked me because I never put on a show with him. I never do with anybody- it takes too much effort and I’m a lazy bastard.

“And how’s my little mermaid?” he shouted across the bar.

I never saw Becs smile at anyone like she smiled at Degger. She adored that man.

“I bet you seen better mermaids than me on your travels, Deggsy” she said.

“Never. None that came close. Not even that one off Cayenne”.

I heard an irritated intake of breath from Cas. It was good for his image to be seen with Degger but he hated that sort of talk. Somehow it seemed to embarrass him.

“An old Greek fellow dived off the taffrail after her. We never saw him again but my was she a looker. Don’t know how they keep that lippy on under water.”

Cas sighed.

“Don’t you believe in mermaids, Cas?”

Cas didn’t answer. He knew whichever way he went on the question he’d look stupid.

“Oh they exist, Cas. It’s just that Linnaeus and David Attenborough have different names for them, Latin names, but I’m sworn to secrecy on that.”

“Where ya living, Degger?” Cas was trying to change the subject and he wasn’t very good at it.

“Here and there”.

Degger didn’t respond to the factual approach. He always said he had been in the Merchant and travelled the world. He’d talk about Valparaiso and Chilean nitrate but nobody round the Pool believed him. If you went into the pubs on Renshaw Street- and everybody knew him- they’d say he based Valparaiso on Birkenhead, and may once have worked the Mersey Ferry. But he was a nice old bloke, and anyway you always like people that like you.

Which way do you walk down Hope Street?

It wasn’t said to anybody specific but a lot of people turned round when Degger came out with those words.

And we put up great buildings on the dockside.

On the greatest there would be eagles perching on top.

But when it was finished there were no eagles,

Only cormorants.

Which way do you walk down Hope Street?

Becs was slowly drying a glass with a tea towel. She went on drying it long beyond necessary as she stared at the man.

Liverpool was built on slavery.

The guilt turned our riches to ashes

And we withered with them.

Which way do you walk down Hope Street?

“What are you up to these days, Gary?” asked Cas. I barely heard him.

So in penance we built not one but two cathedrals.

The Wigwam was for the poor and the Paddies.

They paid for it with their coupons.

The other, the Anglican, was posh and buttoned-up,

A strange place for our city.

Which way do you walk down Hope Street?

“We speak with an accent exceedingly rare,

And if you want a cathedral we’ve got one to spare

In our Liverpool home.”

“Shut up, Cas” said Becs.

Degger took no notice. Even at his age he could have nutted Cas, spread his sharp little nose across his face. But he just waited.

But it was too late.

We faced the wrong way for Europe.

Rotterdam and Felixstowe stole our trade.

We queued, waiting for the benefits office to open.

Which way do you walk down Hope Street?

By now everyone in the pub had their glass suspended in their hand, held somewhere in mid-air and forgotten about.

An old man walks with his eyes on the ground.

Once he knew a fine young woman.

Thirty years later he took her tired thin hand in his

And thought he still saw love in her eyes.

But it was diminished by the sadness of impossibility.

I heard a noise come from Becs’ side of the bar. It sounded like a wounded animal.

As for the City

So for the Citizen.

Which way do you walk down Hope Street?

Nobody applauded. It wouldn’t have seemed right, and he wouldn’t have wanted it. He finished his glass.

“I’ve had my fill. I’ll see you next when night and day meet again on equal terms”.

Becs leaned over the bar to hug him. Then he squeezed my arm- pretty hard too- and was gone.

“Huh” said Cas. I really don’t believe he could think of anything else to say although that was one word too many. But because people looked at him he had to add to it.

“Well he certainly knows the benefits office.”

He tried to finish his glass but couldn’t so he plonked it on the bar and left. He was a troubled man was Cas.

“Drink up everybody”, said Becs.

People did. The evening was over. They moved away. I was finishing my ale when she took hold of my arm.

“You’re going nowhere, boy”, she said.

She got the last customers out and bolted the doors with me still inside. She poured me a whisky and told me to stay in the bar while she went upstairs. I cradled the glass before savouring its smoky Irish flavour. I felt charged, emotional, but I wasn’t quite sure why. Then she appeared again. Did she look a sight in her basque and fishnets, and she looked even better for the old jacket she’d put on over them, and the cap.

“Deggsy was right”, I said “That one off Cayenne would haven’t stood a chance next to you”.

“Bring your drink upstairs”

She took me to her bedroom which was like an extension of the pub, dark and full of coloured glass and subdued lighting in strange places. This time I noticed. The bed was big and there was a huge cover on it that glistened and was, at least in that light, a sort of sage green. It seemed a mermaidy sort of colour. She had laid upon it a series of old and slightly grubby picture postcards with scenes that were unfamiliar to me.

“He was talking about my Mam you know.”

“Yeah” I said.

“You’re a storyteller, Gary, but Deggsy always tries to tell the truth in the best way he can find to tell it.”

“Yeah”.

“Anybody who wasn’t a complete fool like that lawyer would have realised he only ever talked about South America because that was where he was for years. If he was just making it up he’d have talked about places all across the world. Wouldn’t he? And all the time he kept sending my Mam these postcards. Look at them, Gary.”

I took them in my hands one by one. They were pictures of Chile mainly- of gardens and statues, children in a lot of them, then cathedrals and liners, and one of an Antofagasta copper mine.

“They’d split up. That’s why he went out there. Then he stopped sending them. We never knew why. To be honest Mam was already on her third fellow after him so she didn’t really mind.”

“And then they met again.”

“By accident. In Renshaw Street it was. And they both knew.”

I nodded. I took a final sip of the Bushmills.

“What an evening it’s been”, I said.

“Don’t blather, Gary.”

“What?” To be honest that made me smile.

“What I mean is, you can shut up now and fuck me.”

And I did. Becs had had a few disappointments in her life and I didn’t wish to add to them. I’m not sure it was entirely satisfactory but I guess it sufficed.

                                               ****************************

Cormorants flew over Liverpool darkening the sky. They dived into the Mersey and pulled out mermaids by their fishy tails. A rat with a face like Cas was seen in the public bar of the Baltic Fleet. And all around a din likes the doors of Hell were being rammed shut one after the other with all of us inside them.

And then the sky lightened. As I opened my eyes I was alone in that bed. The cormorants had gone but not the hellish racket. It was seven o’clock. Those brewery wagons keep infernal hours. The hollow bumping of the metal barrels on the ramp into the cellars continued awhile. I got up. Then I got myself ready to leave. When I got outside on to the pavement the cellar door was closed again and all was silent. There was no sign of her.

There was no sign of the sea-river of the night before either, just a few pools of water dotted over the grass. There was a damp and focused freshness in the air. The night gone seemed not so much a dream as a vision. It was too focused for a dream and would remain so for years to come. Visions, unlike happenings and dreams, do not fall victim to failing memory.

I went to a cafe down the road to have some breakfast. I started playing with my phone. Should I ring her? Maybe send her a text. NICE FUCK. A bit on the nose, so to speak. LOVE YA. That struck a false note. I put the phone back in my pocket and went back to the breakfast. I was sitting in a window seat and a gull came and perched on the ledge and looked at me. I felt it knew me, that it understood more about me than I did myself. I felt my soul being exposed. By a bird!

I never saw any of them ever again. You just never know. Treat every time you see a friend as if it is the last time. Cas, always a bit of a closet royalist, spent time at Her Majesty’s pleasure for failing to redeem a couple of hefty mortgages. Degger just disappeared. He’s probably dead by now. The streets of Liverpool aren’t the same these days. The old crowd have gone. It happens quicker than you might think. You never know a good thing until it’s gone. As for Becs she left that pub and I heard she took up with a trannie. I think he was more than a dresser, some sort of surgery involved. Anyway he ran a club behind Bootle container docks. Becs was always an imaginative girl and somebody like that gave her more options.

Me? Me, I just went on a long long wander.