The Dead & The Drowning Read online

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  We drive east out of the city passed rows of drab factory units and glass fronted retail outlets with garish signs. The outskirts contain mostly bland housing developments that are new and grey, and a poor contrast to the colourful corrugated fronts of old downtown. What set it apart from other cities is the lack of pollution and grime; apart from the graffiti it is clean and uncluttered, with open space and the absence of decay. It is the antithesis of my home town Port Talbot: a dirty steel town by the sea, a town of smoke and steam, of orange sulphur skies and tar stained sand. A town of poverty and pawn shops, bookies and pound stores. A sick town of pasties and fat filled leggings, of tappy walking sticks, smoker's coughs and busy chemists. A town of bedsits and Staffy dogs, broken families and needle driven oblivion. I saw the bad but there was the good. There had been a great deal of investment in face-lifting the train station, developing the seafront and building a super-sized comprehensive school, and the town is presentable in places; but for me all the bad that I had witnessed had tainted the good, like a stench you can't get rid of however much you clean.

  We reach the open road and head north: houses stretched out from one another and became more individual, and wild Icelandic ponies ran the green fields in between. Mountains white capped and marbled with snow stood impressively in the distance. Traffic thinned out becoming more sporadic, and we passed a couple of strange structures erected at the side of the road warning motorists that there is danger to be found in these vast stretches. These were steel frames holding aloft two smashed cars in simulated collision, with a number on a Christian cross beneath denoting the number of fatalities.

  “So where are we heading?” I ask.

  “Ah that would spoil the surprise,” Toni replies.

  “A magical mystery tour around Iceland then. Will there be any hidden Easter eggs to find?” I scoff.

  “There might be,” and Toni lets out a self-knowing chuckle. “There will be if I'm right.”

  A silly joke which was not perhaps a joke, or a joke returned. I join in, I enjoy abstract humour.

  “What … actual Easter eggs … are we looking for a giant white bunny with a sack then?”

  “Not quite.”

  Toni takes her eyes off the road and her face moves through a series of mischievous expressions. She is playing with me and enjoying my confusion. I would have to work for the answer, if of course there is one. I speculate that if there is a purpose to this trip it isn't mundane.

  “Not quite,” I echo. “Okay you've succeeded in piquing my interest, and it has been piqued a lot since I met you.”

  I stroke my beard and ponder a moment before saying in a vaguely Holmes like manner,

  “First scenario is that this is a travel game popular in Buffalo where the driver of a car bullshits the passenger to while away the time. The other scenario is that you are searching for something other than yourself on this lump of volcanic rock.”

  “Well! you got me, us Buffalonians love to bullshit,” she says in a corny, confessional style.

  “A bullshitter would say that though, we could still be playing,” I laugh.

  “Yes, we could.”

  I am not at all sure, and I guess I will have to wait to find out.

  I notice the petrol tank is a third full.

  “We're going to have to stop at the next petrol station, they are few and far between on this route.”

  “There's a bag of munchies in the back, help yourself and pass me a coke would you?”

  I turn in my seat and reach back for the yellow shopping bag on the rear seat. It is a Bonus bag with a pink pig emblem – Bonus is the closest Iceland has got to a pound shop. There are four bottles of cola and I retrieve two, handing one to Toni. It is warmer than I would like, but I am far short on my daily caffeine intake and coke is always good for a hangover.

  In my trouser pocket my phone vibrates. I wriggle in the seat and pull it out of my jeans; I have a text message. It is from Paul Spender a Detective Sergeant that I used to work with when we were both plain clothes cops on the Drugs Team in Neath. He had gone onto better jobs and I hadn't. We had got on, but after going our separate ways we had not kept in touch outside of chance meetings in work.

  “Hi Will, hope you are well. I thought you would want to know that Chris Stillman died in a motorcycle accident on Thursday. The funeral is yet to be arranged and we're having a collection for a wreath.”

  I re-read it, death had been distilled to a text. It didn't seem real looking down on it on my phone. Chris Stillman was a tank and the best officer to have at your side when things got ugly – period. A former prop forward for Aberavon Rugby Team, he was a thick square man with practically no neck and a crudely carved block for a head. He had massive strength and could carry a fourteen stone man by the belt like a suitcase - and I had seen him do it. Damn! I thought, why does death always have to take the good ones.

  We had worked together in Cwmavon on a Community Action Team and were a rough pair. We really made our presence felt in the Afan Valley and the local crims were scared shitless of us. We always liked filling our van up and used to laugh that a day without a prisoner was like a day without sunshine. The two of us certainly made a dent in the local crime figures, and many crims stopped fucking around on our patch and offended elsewhere.

  Chris was good fun too and we'd mess about in Cwmavon Nick; an old police house that was with the other half of the team we shared it with all our own. Chris would pick up roadkill and stick it in my locker, and I pulled shit like putting itching powder in his boots, or salt in his coffee. On shifts when the four of us worked together we'd play football inside the station, and there would be bedlam with files and fire extinguishers getting knocked everywhere.

  I realize now that those two years were the best of times and the happiest I'd be in the job; because the police is like a desert of shifting sands, an unsettling job of change and movement. Sure enough, the team was centralized at Port Talbot, then its remit and priorities changed, then reduced and ultimately disbanded. We all went off to other roles and I foolishly sought promotion. Chris was one of the few guys I'd worked with that I kept in contact with, and we would regularly go mountain biking together on the Afan Valley trails or meet up in Swansea for a pint and a curry.

  I have a collage of memories with one that stands out among the rest, that summed the man up. It is fragmented and a little blurred or enhanced in places, but that’s how memories are.

  02:09 Saturday 9th September 2007.

  Station Road, Port Talbot.

  I scope the street.

  Jimmy’s Bar is kicking out.

  I watch as they spill out in dribs and drabs milling around on the pavement, drinking their unfinished bottles in the amber glare of a town centre night.

  Slack faced scumbags with vacant eyes, with bug eyes and grinding jaws. Cocky and spiteful, borderline criminal and criminal, twats and wasters almost to a man and woman.

  I know them, they know me.

  Shouts across the street, horse play, girls over shoulders, queues for taxis; I watch and wait for it to happen.

  People standing in the road, people slobbering over kebabs, people heaving up their guts in shop doorways.

  I tremble and kick the adrenaline out of aching feet.

  Young tearaways on small stunt bikes and repainted mountain bikes, half-dressed girls with sore feet carrying their shoes, those that have pulled snogging and groping in dark recesses.

  I look for trouble: face offs and straining necks, stabbing fingers and people being dragged away.

  I wave at a passing panda and check my watch: 02:13 off at three - If I‘m lucky.

  Eyes back to Jimmy’s and to the bulk of drug dealer Lee Pike stooping into a silver Citroen. I take down the registration plate for an intel. log later.

  Then it flares - at the open door of a black cab two guys thrash and jerk into the road, punching, grabbing, stumbling.

  I move, PC Chris Stillman behind me, t
owards two bodies rolling in the headlights of a halted car.

  We sink our hands into the struggle and separate them.

  I pull up the younger one: sun bed and highlights his flip flops in the road.

  I take him to the pavement.

  Aftermath: torn shirt, split lip, hysterical girlfriend.

  “I’m going to kill the cunt!”

  I look unimpressed, feel unimpressed; Chris at my shoulder,

  “Minor injuries and custody are full, next drop off is Merthyr.”

  Enough said.

  “No, you’re not, you’re going home.”

  I tune them out and keep talking, moving them towards a taxi I’ve flagged.

  The blood is up, stirred monkeys in a zoo, bouncing off the walls, bouncing off each other - contagion.

  I hear a bottle smash behind me, pig yelled from across the street.

  Them hating me, me hating them.

  Fucking Port Talbot.

  Another fight breaks out and careers into the crowd knocking over a girl.

  Two involved, with others from the sides sniping cheap shots.

  Bear pit.

  Head pulled down and smashed with a fist, smashed with a fist again and again.

  I’m running.

  Man bent over, face coming apart - there for the kill, the pack baying, closing in.

  I’m too late.

  A two am warrior emerges from the left and detonates a knee off the bent man‘s head - contorted face snapped back across the shoulders, legs giving way, his face splatting into the pavement.

  Must stop the kicks, the stomps, the hospital bed finishers.

  Calls from the crowd, the assassin turns, flinches - is hit with a tackle.

  He struggles, twisting, straining and shouting to stay standing, but I dig my grip in tighter around his waist and drive.

  The sick orange lights, the cracked grey pavement, a line of blurred faces - spinning as we crash.

  I’m on top - his teeth bared, arms poles to my neck.

  Remember the cameras.

  I break them; flip him over - his face in the cracks, cuffs out.

  “Get the fuck off him!”

  Jeers, gobs of spit, something at my back - simmering ready to boil over.

  In the bear pit.

  Fucking Port Toilet.

  Fighting for his arms amid cartons and chip paper.

  I screw a hand in to his chest and wrench one out and I jam it up his back.

  “I’m getting this.”

  A skinny, shaven headed Scrote with tribal tatts named Luke Parsons is squatting down in front of me, his mobile pointed at my head; the small bad toothed hole in his pinched face having a go at a grin.

  Straight in on my shit list.

  “Stop resisting, you are under arrest for assault.”

  I snap on a cuff and tweak.

  “Give me your hand!”

  It comes.

  “You're fucking hurting me!”

  And with that it boils over into a bloody mess.

  I'm knocked, grabbed, pulled, beer splashing on my neck and cheek.

  Buffeted like a small boat I go over.

  A trainer skims my face.

  “Stamp the pig cunt!”

  Another comes in, now blood is in the water.

  They rain in – a free-for-all on a downed copper.

  My vision shakes like a badly held camera and I can't get traction.

  I hear a roar.

  “Get back …. get back!”

  The crowd buckles and bodies fly, jack-knifing and colliding off one another.

  Stillman shoulders, Stillman shoves, Stillman hurls them out of the way.

  Stillman is over me, his Asp scything space, smashing hands and whacking thighs of those too slow or stupid to get out of the way – Stillman the barbarian laying slaughter to the shitbags of Station Road.

  I get up unhurt, and the rats run as a police van revs around the corner and stops in the middle of the street, blue lights pinging off the shop windows and hairy assed coppers jumping out.

  I then hear Stillman say in that gruff Ammanford voice, a proper Welsh voice.

  “Is that your prisoner Willsy running down the road? You'd better get after him, you know I don't run.”

  Tragic, fucking tragic; tears well in my eyes, I rub them, and they sting causing me to blink uncontrollably. I breathe out and try to hold it together; I've known this woman for two minutes and it doesn't feel right blubbering in front of her.

  “You're upset what's wrong?”

  No point in denying it and I didn't want to tell her another lie.

  “Just had a text telling me that an old friend of mine has suddenly passed away.”

  “Oh, I'm sorry to hear that,” and Toni put her hand on my thigh and gave it a squeeze.

  I force a smile and said with a slightly quavering voice something I felt but ought not to have said.

  “Life is pretty dreadful really.”

  “I suppose it is, sooner or later. It's just something you've got to accept and move through, or otherwise you're dead before you are dead. Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss in life is what dies inside of us while we live,” she said matter-of-factly, though to my tender ear it sounded glib and something you’d get out of a self-help book.

  “You're quite the philosopher.”

  “Yes, amongst many other things. Stick with me kid and you'll learn something.”

  Toni winked and made a pistol with her index finger and thumb. She tilted her hand and made a clicking sound inside of her mouth with her tongue. I am beginning to see that phoney self-aggrandizement is her schtick.

  “Do you often steal lines from movies cowgirl?”

  “Occasionally, the rest I get from books, records and toilet walls.”

  “Touché,” I reply knowing I'd met my match and in the midst of the banter I forget I am sad; however, this is short lived, and the sun soon goes back behind the clouds.

  I think about what she had said; there are the dead all right, the just found in bed dead, and the bloated black sack of maggots dead, and many other gruesome types of dead: train track shovel up the pieces dead, own dog eat your head dead, and they bear no resemblance to the living. No, you aren't dead before you are dead, there is something in between - there is the dead ... there is the dead and the drowning. I think it through because I have the need to put handles on things even if they don't always fit.

  A swimmer with strong strokes making headway in a calm sea, having direction and feeling buoyant. Then travails: capricious currents, fickle weather, an unseen squall gathering on the horizon. Fatigue creeps in. Anxiously treading water, drifting from the shoreline – struggling, sinking, drowning. Into deep cold waters, into dark depths where lines blur and break - and the person is lost. Except of course that some poor buggers could never swim to begin with and were drowning from the start.

  “Will.”

  I snap out of it,

  “Yeah.”

  “We're getting low on gas, check out where the nearest gas station is, we might have to go off the route.”

  The RAV had only had a third of a tank at the start of the journey and we really should have filled up before leaving Reykjavik. I check google maps on my phone and there is a small town called Borgarnes three kilometres ahead of us. I put the name into Wikipedia and find that it has a gas station, swimming pool and a museum.

  “We're good, there's a town just up ahead of us where we can fill up.”

  I want to leave my sullen thoughts and get on to a lighter conversation, and Toni beats me to it.

  “So, I've been wondering, did you used to be a boxer or something?”

  “Yeah, and in a way I guess I still am.”

  “How can I say this sensitively … I can't. Aren't you too old at forty five to be taking punches to the head?”

  “Well I only boxed seriously as an amateur to my mid-twenties. Then I started a career and got married and let it slide. I still kept i
n shape at the club and sparred with the guys, then for fun I got involved in the white-collar boxing scene. It's like exhibition boxing and we raise money for good causes.”

  “When you were serious were you any good or were you a bum?” she says cheekily.

  “Pardon me … a bum, no I was never a bum and that is such an Americanism. Actually, I was pretty decent, not great but I could mix it with those that were. I won a Welsh Amateur title three times at middleweight and was a runner up on two other occasions. Two of three times I qualified as Welsh champion for the British championship I got put out straight away in the semi-finals - got beaten by a lad from the army and a Scot named Darren McKenzie who went onto to win a bronze in the Olympics.

  My last run at it I stopped an Irish boy in the semi and reached the final. I fought the same Scotsman McKenzie who had defeated me the previous year. He boxed my ears off like he did before, but I caught up with him in the last round and dropped him with a body shot. He rose at eight and clung on for the last twenty seconds to get his hand raised after the bell. My limitation at that level was that I lacked finesse. I could punch holes in people who stood in front of me, though I was often frustrated and outclassed by slick boxers like McKenzie who knew how to hit and move.

  My favourite thing about boxing now is the heavy bag. I love the heavy bag and use it as much as other people run. I can tell that you work out quite a bit, what do you like to do?”

  “I do CrossFit two to three times a week. I hit the Workouts of The Day as hard as I can, though I'm not into the whole Paleo eating thing. I tried it and after two days I wanted to eat my own arm. I like pizza and I like beer.”

  “No right-minded individual doesn't,” I said.

  Chapter 7

  The Borgarfjarðarbrú bridge lays ahead and reaches over the fjord to Borgarnes. It is a long, simple concrete bridge propped up low above the water. This small town which is really no more than a village, sits neatly on a short peninsula. The roofs of the buildings are a patchwork of colours, and the buildings themselves are large and independent of one another. Standing on a low hill above the town is its notable structure: a white church with a slender tower that forms to a black point like a wizard's hat.