Free Hemispheres by Stephen Baker Page A

grey-green eyes looked bored.
    I’m down to London next Saturday meself, he said. Crystal Palace. Always good for a barney like.
    Thought you were working.
    He shrugged again.
    Day off, he said. If you’re in that neck of the woods you could meet us at King’s Cross after the game. Six o’clock, top of
     the main escalators.
    How are you going to afford the train?
    He looked at me like I was remedial.
    I’m bunking the fucker, he said.
    Later I lay on my bed in the box room and waited. Fully clothed, boots on, the red glow of the radio alarm on my bedside table.
     Numbers cycling painfully, time grinding to a halt. In my hand was Yan’s diary, curled up into a tube. I wound it tighter.
    There was something going on in Michelle’s room next door. Bumping, shuffling, a sudden loud laugh and then a long female
     moan. She put it on a plate for just about anybody them days.
    She was an odd one, Michelle. Always semi-bewildered, like you asked her a question and her eyes roved around in confusion
     before she hit on the right thing to say. I never worked out why Yan gave her the hours behind the bar, but fair play to him,
     she turned out to be a natural. Yan had this habit of adopting waifs and strays now and then. Paul O’Rourke was another one
     he helped out a couple of times when his mam had kicked him out. He was staying at ours when he first had the bonehead done
     but Yan didn’t say owt, just looked at him funny.
    You ever get that done, he said to me later, you’ll be moving out.
    No shit. I smiled as I plugged in the clippers and turned them on and then my hair began to fall across the pages of yesterday’s
Gazette
, the soundless precipitation obscuring the newsprint. The blades ranged across my scalp, buzzing dispassionately. When it
     was finished I brushed stray hairs away and looked in the mirror at my own head gleaming nude like a pool ball. Ran a hand
     across the shorn scalp, felt it tickling like the new pink skin under a blister.
    Downstairs in the bar it was pitch dark. I’d waited long after the last sound, long after the last arsehole had pitched out
     into the night. I counted out nine steps to the bar, hands stretched in front of me until I felt the pitted wood of the counter.
     Lifted the flap and sidled through, ran my fingers along the cold metal sides of the till, the drawerspringing open and butting against my palm. Fingertips danced across the compartments inside, scooped up a wad of notes and
     smuggled it into my pocket. It felt like a lot. I stopped to listen. Nothing. Just the night-time breath of an old building.
     The bleating of water in copper pipes, the scratchy stubble of stale plaster, the insect legs of the clock crawling. I picked
     up the phone and dialled, flinching each time the dial clicked back against the stops.
    I waited under the railway bridge, just a hundred yards down the road. I was nervous, skittering the sports bag against my
     ankles, fingering the notes in my pocket. There was no traffic here in the small hours. A street lamp flickered on and off,
     alive, dead, alive, and the air was cold. A minicab pulled up next to me, engine idling, and the driver wound his window down.
     It was Mr Shahid, eyes sharpened above the moustache.
    Daniel, he said.
    Darlo station, I said.
    The train carriage was brightly lit and almost deserted. Flickering through the sleeping country like the calendar riffling
     past, the lighted windows of the year. Bright and rattling, and then gone, a memory. I leaned back in my seat and lit a cigarette.
     It gurgled as I did so, the flame searing into the paper and the dry tobacco. I unzipped the sports bag and looked over my
     supplies. Chocolate bars and crisps, a token apple. Some cans from the bar. I pulled out a can of McEwan’s and ripped it open.
     It wasn’t cold, but was rich and malty in the throat. I gulped at it.
    Lightning crawled across the sky as the train ran south. I put my head back against the headrest and slowed my