WHERE FURNACES BURN

JOEL

LANE

WHERE FURNACES BURN

Influx Press

London

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

My Stone Desire

Still Water

Morning’s echo

The Hostess

Blue Smoke

Beth’s Law

A Cup Of Blood

Even The Pawn

A Mouth to Feed

Quarantine

Black Country

Without A Mind

The Sunken City

Incry

The Last Witness

Dreams of Children

Waiting for the Thaw

Stiff as Toys

The Victim Card

Winter Journey

Slow Burn

The Receivers

Wake Up in Moloch

Point of Departure

Blind Circles

Facing the Wall

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also available from Joel Lane and Influx Press

Copyright

For Mark Valentine – a true connoisseur of the unknown

An Introduction to

Where Furnaces Burn

R.M. FRANCIS

I grew up in the region Joel Lane takes his readers to. I’ve lived here most of my life: the Black Country – real and imagined. I recognise the eerie and weird in its landscapes and mindscapes. Lane’s horrors could only ever come from this place. A place of breakages, borderlands, disjunctions, and displacements.

The Black Country is a strange place. It’s not found on maps and its borders are under constant contestation. A region known for its Industrial heritage; we’re now haunted by the residues and ruins. Old railway lines and bell pits punctuate an off-kilter landscape built of green and grey. Rewilded spoil heaps cosy up next to large housing estates. Wildflowers and rare insects share space with litter, graffiti, and clandestine behaviours. Not a conventionally beautiful place, but one Joel Lane saw the beauty in and helped me reconfigure my love for.

I came across Lane’s work in my early adult years. I’d just finished my English Literature degree and had returned to my homelands. Like most twentysomething dweebs, I thought everything that was interesting in the world happened somewhere other than my neck of the woods. Then I stumbled on some of his stories and poems in Dudley Library. Oh shit! I thought, I’ve completely overlooked this place and completely underappreciated its strangeness. One of literature’s strengths is its unique ability to remind us and give language and image to that which we’d forgotten we knew. Reading Lane taught me that too. He taught it viscerally.

I’m reminded of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytical landscapes here. Like Lane’s regions, conflict and ambivalence are at its core. Distinct parts of our selfhood wrestle, lose traction, crack, and then reform. Self is a site of breakages. Lacan refers to the mirror stage, where one recognises their reflection in the process of becoming a subject. We recognise a distinct individual. We also notice an imaginary, perfect self which is then quashed as we become socialised. This imagined reflection of self is something that one wishes to regain, because it is pure self. We’re afraid of it too – it is our pre-socialised unruliness. This unruly yet beautiful thing is Lacan’s Lamella. Lacan says:

Whenever the membranes of the egg in which the foetus emerges on its way to becoming a new-born are broken, imagine for a moment that something flies off, and that one can do it with an egg as easily as with a man, namely the hommelette, or the lamella.

This thing is a part of our self which is constantly around, always chasing but cannot be fixed upon. It is the result of the very act of passing through the mirror stage, jettisoning the abject or orientating our castration complexes – it hides, haunts, seduces, and sickens. Like Freud’s id – it is the primal, unruly part of our psyche. You’ll catch glimpses of this almost-untraceable, infinite and infinitesimal, equally attractive and repulsive being, which is you and not you, throughout Where Furnaces Burn. Like me, you might be reminded of things lost or best forgotten. It might reignite things long repressed in the dank recesses of your mind.

In Stambermill, my five-year-old self raced bikes through housing estates and around the backs of homes where patches of woods make dens for rodents and gangs of naughty kids. Here, the river Stour’s polluted currents meander past scrap yards, small holdings, and old, barren pubs. The waters run under the blue brick arches of a Victorian viaduct where mosses and lichens rhizome and the ghosts of freight still rumble if you know how to listen for them. A similar in-between and off-kilter landscape is found in ‘My Stone Desire’ and ‘Still Water’. In these tales, rural, urban, organic, and machine conjugate to form erotic and abject hauntings. This refrain runs through this collection, tracking the old case notes of a West Midlands police officer, as he charts his own alienated and disquieted career and personal life, full of unusual sex, dislocated experiences, and a strange sense of lack. A lack that springs out of the liminal and the residues of place-identity.

My fourteen-year-old self wanders up the Thorns Road to meet mates on the top of Quarry Bank. No one knows where the borders are here; we are between different subsets of the DY postcodes. Looking up I see Merry Hill Shopping Centre, a hyperreal, indoor town built on the remains of Round Oak Steelworks. Looking down, the industrial estates and webbed terrace streets of The Lye. This is the land Lane called Clayheath in ‘Black Country’, a place revisited from the looping narrative of ‘The Lost District’ in his earlier collection. The hoard of thefts and vile juvenile criminality in this story springs forth in the liminal and the dreamscapes – literally and figuratively. It seems the culprit is a John Doe, built from the layers of lost childhoods and liminal lives that were never allowed to reach out and fulfil anything.  

My nineteen-year-old self drives out to the Worcestershire countryside on the edges of my region: Hagley, Kinver, Bewdley. These sites seem natural but are more cultured than first appears. These are spaces where the rural and urban mingle – one threatens to overtake the other. Lane uses these edgelands and plays an explicitly Weird card in ‘A Mouth to Feed’, drawing on the primal critters of Bram Stoker’s Lair of the White Worm or Robert E. Howard’s Worms of the Earth. His Lindworm is the phallic lamella, sitting on the rural edge of the urban and modern; the sleeping threat of an encroaching primal force that might envelope and erase our existence.

My thirty-year-old self stumbles home from Turner’s pub to the Sledmere estate in Netherton. I cut through the allotments and down the canal tow path. I navigate the ruins of an old engine house and the dried-up hole of a now defunct reservoir. Spoil heaps have been rewilded by pollen-heavy weeds. The rust of corrugated roofs from the dark industrial estate puncture the skyline. Netherton tunnel eats through one-and-a-half miles of dolerite hillside. Here, it’s easy to envision the shamanic and erotic machine-god of ‘Wake up in Moloch’. In ‘the unique patchwork of urban villages and gravel meadows’ that mark out Netherton, is something ‘like a giant steam engine turned inside out’ which is the centre for a vampiric and pagan orgiastic worship. At the start of this tale, we’re warned that this place ‘grew out of the Industrial Revolution […] It was inevitable that sooner or later, we’d have to give something back’. Again then, this fusion of organic and machine, animate and inanimate, past and present brings forth some peripheral yet overwhelming and inexplicable threat.

In the final case, our detective discusses his retirement. ‘There isn’t a why,’ he says, ‘There’s just what happened. But everything falls apart, so perhaps it doesn’t need much explanation.’ But there is some explanation – inexplicable as the answer may be. The trouble is, as Morton suggests in ‘Slow Burn’, ‘THEY DON’T BELONG HERE. What belongs here doesn’t belong in the world.’ It’s in the ground itself. It’s in the mineral-rich elements that produced the industrial heartlands of the UK. In the deep time and the geological residues of the place.

My thirty-seven-year-old self walks a Staffie around the damp and desolate grounds of Wren’s Nest Nature Reserve. I lived here for six years and know it in all its tiny details; a quintessentially Black Country space. The nature reserve is a lush and beautiful site of protected flora and fauna, home to fossilised ripple beds and Silurian outcrops. It’s also full of industrial relics – mineshafts and old railway lines. One of Dudley’s infamous council estates wraps around the whole thing. This is a place where domestic, industrial, natural, and geological create strange confluences. We are safe and unsafe here, familiar and unfamiliar, attracted and repulsed. The hallmarks of the abject and uncanny. The story ‘Slow Burn’ deals with this explicitly. In Lane’s hands, these Wren’s Nest confluences produce a harrowing genius loci: ‘It had a thin, spineless body, but its hands were wide and reaching towards us with bloodless fingers. Its face was a swirl, a thumbprint, without eyes or mouth’. This spirit of place hollows the community and the people making this queer space their home.

The land is toxic. Its history is toxic. The Black Country is a country blackened. It diseases the area and its inhabitants. Bodiless beings, broken and lacking, are summoned by this. Now, nearly forty, I taste the bitter brambles that thicket the canal tow paths of my homelands. I’m looking for my own lost districts – I cannot help myself.

Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1998)

R. M. Francis is a lecturer in Creative and Professional Writing at the University of Wolverhampton. He’s the author of novels, Bella and The Wrenna (Wild Pressed Books) and poetry collections Subsidence (Smokestack Books) and The Chain Coral Chorus (Play Dead Press). His essays have been published in journals and edited collections and he co-edited the book, Smell, Memory and Literature in the Black Country (Palgrave MacMillan). He is reviews editor for the Journal of Class and Culture.

My Stone Desire

Some people join the police force to try and make a difference to society. Some do it to try and keep things the same. Some do it because they like beating people up—and they’re the only ones who don’t end up disappointed. I’m still not sure why I joined the force, or why I stayed in it for twenty-four years. But I think it had to do with needing to understand. Police work was about finding evidence and explaining. There was no room for the unknown, or for the complications that lead from one thing to all kinds of other things. I was young then, of course.

When I started training for police work in Wolverhampton, I left home for the first time and rented a truly dreadful flat in Coseley, a few miles outside the city. It was part of a converted house that had once belonged to a fairly wealthy family. The exterior was still quite impressive, but the interior was largely plasterboard held in place by woodchip wallpaper. The water pipes had the ghost of a murdered child trapped inside them. The fuses regularly blew if two people in the house were cooking at the same time. Not that you could cook much on the tiny, sluggish Baby Belling cooker in the corner of my living room.

In the early days, I spent as much of my off-duty time in Wolverhampton as possible. There was a lot of good live music around at that time; blues and folk as well as the grinding industrial rock that would eventually be called heavy metal. I was on my way home from some gig or other, waiting in a frost-coated bus shelter for the last bus out, when I met a dark-haired girl called Kath. The next weekend, we met again for a drink. Kath lived with her parents in Tipton, a few miles south of Coseley, deep in the estranged heart of the Black Country. She could speak the Tipton dialect, which no-one outside the town understands.

By early spring, Kath was spending the weekends at my place. We’d sit up late, smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap vodka, sleep into the afternoon and make love until nightfall. It was my first experience of intimacy— whether physical or emotional—and I couldn’t seem to get enough of her. The bed stank of tobacco smoke and flesh. What I liked best was the dreamlike recovery from the climax, when we held each other and slowly got our breath back while the shock of joy went on echoing in our veins. At those times Kath seemed like a recently fallen angel, her skin glowing, her eyes filled with a mysterious bitter light.

When we met during the week, there was rarely time for us to go back to Coseley together. We’d see a gig or a film in Wolverhampton, then walk out together along the bus route heading south. Just where the factories gave way to fields and woodland, there was a low railway bridge of blackened stone and criss-crossed iron girders. At night, the underside of the bridge was murky and cold. Young couples went there to smoke dope, drink bottled beer and screw. Sometimes there were people hanging around, and we wouldn’t stay. But often we were alone, holding each other in the blurred half-light and kissing desperately as the cars sped past. Or looking up at the intricate, barely visible iron lattice as if it was a stained-glass window, some kind of design we needed to interpret.

One night when it was raining, we sheltered under the dripping bridge to warm our hands on each other’s skin. Droplets of rain flickered in Kath’s hair. I kissed her closed eyelids, and her mouth twisted with some emotion she didn’t have words for. Her nipples were rigid under her thin shirt. Being quite small-breasted, she often didn’t wear a bra. Our mouths locked together, sharing breath. I felt the distant pulse of an approaching train. Then its passing shuddered through us, and the quiet was torn apart like a tarpaulin over a nail bomb. Kath pressed against me, breathing hard. My fingers found her open.

Kath bit my lips as I shared her with the lime-smeared wall, fumbling to remove the barriers of fabric between us. The air was cold, too cold for this. Kath’s muscles locked me inside her. It felt unreal, or perhaps more real than I was. We struggled, cried out, froze together. The night was suddenly very still. Kath found a tissue and wiped her thigh. I felt as though I had violated her, or something had violated both of us. We walked to the bus stop in silence, holding hands, a little shaky from the violence of it. Thirty years on, I still remember how that felt.

A few weeks after that, Kath told me she was late. ‘I must have forgotten to take the pill,’ she said. We were sitting in a café near the bookshop where she worked. In those days, there were several bookshops in Wolverhampton. She lit a cigarette but stubbed it out after one draw. I noticed that her make-up was clumsily applied, the eyeshadow not quite masking the effects of a sleepless night. Her fingernails pierced the back of my hand. ‘Can I move in with you?’ she asked.

I felt my head shaking before I’d even thought about it. Panic gripped me. ‘You did it on purpose,’ I said. ‘Getting pregnant so you could leave home.’ I apologised almost at once, but the damage was done. Things unravelled quickly after that. A few awkward phone conversations; one more shared night, bitter and restless; then nothing.

As a child, I had a recurrent dream of a hidden place. It was part of a waste ground, not far from my school. No such location existed in my waking life, but each time I dreamed of it the memory was clear. I wandered through brittle ferns and the grey fringes of willow trees towards a ruined wall, on the far side of which someone was waiting for me. When I reached the wall, I could hear traffic going past rapidly on the other side. I remembered that only the road was there.

Kath got another job and didn’t come into Wolverhampton any more. I think she had the baby, but I don’t know if she kept it. More than anything, I felt tired—as if the sleep debt from the past four months needed to be paid off all at once. The rainy spring dried out into a stale, metallic summer. I concentrated on passing the police entrance exams.

By the end of the year, I was a constable in the Missing Persons team. Off duty, I kept to myself for the most part. They built a new expressway going south out of Wolverhampton, and closed down the road that passed under the railway bridge. I walked out there one freezing afternoon and saw the bridge had already deteriorated: a dense black mould was spreading on the walls and blurring the overhead girders. There was a smell of decaying stone, if stone could decay. I never took another girl there.

The Missing Persons work was fairly demanding, though I soon became frustrated by the lack of answers. Almost every week, someone in the region would disappear—and not only loners but young couples, pregnant women, even people with families. My more experienced colleagues seemed to take it for granted that no-one would ever turn up. ‘Either they’re alive and hiding, or dead and someone has buried them,’ my supervisor commented.

The local paper ran a few stories about the missing people, but it made no difference. I began to realise how fragile the links between people really were. Like a necklace that broke at the least strain, scattering beads everywhere. I tried not to think about Kath and the baby. Eventually they became unreal to me. Muddy Waters seemed to have the relationship thing sussed.

One night in early spring, I took a girl back to my flat. She complained about the smell in the bedroom— ‘It’s like there’s something dead in the wall.’ I hadn’t even noticed, but when Susan pulled the mattress back I could see a black skin forming over the woodchip wallpaper. It had crept up from a discoloured piece of skirting board. I touched the mould with a fingertip. It was smooth and yielding, like a bruise.

We took the mattress and blankets into the living room that night and slept with the gas fire on. I dreamt the house was burning down, and woke up sweaty and confused. The orange light glowed through crumpled tissues on the floor. There was a dark shape huddled in the blankets beside me, smelling of blood and perfume. I didn’t want her to wake up.

The next day, I scraped all the mould off the wall and dabbed bleach onto the raw plaster. Then I dried the surface with an electric fan heater. The next morning, it was already growing back. I scraped it off again. Once separated from the wall it became flaky and brittle, like ashes. I moved the bed into the middle of the room. In the morning, the wallpaper in the corner was grey and puffy. By the next evening, the mould was back again.

I stuck a poster over it and went out to phone the landlord, then stopped at the pub on the way back. By the weekend, the poster had split down the middle. I could see the blackened plaster behind it.

I’m not sure what made me go back to the railway bridge that weekend. Perhaps I wanted to be forgiven, allowed back into the past. And I was naïve enough to imagine I could reach it on my own.

As I walked along the disused road in the moonlight, the bridge looked different even from a distance. I thought it was because the streetlights weren’t working any more. But as I reached the bridge and stood just outside its shadow, I could see that the stone and brick of its exterior were entirely covered with uneven black mould. The pale streaks of lime that the rain had leached from the brickwork were no longer visible.

The moonlight revealed another difference too: something the mould had hidden from me before. The structure of the bridge was made up of tightly packed, naked human bodies, twisted together in the warmth of slow decay. They looked as if they were about to move, but they were still. I was close enough to smell them.

My hand reached out, but I was afraid to touch the wall. Afraid that I might not be able to leave. In that moment, I realised they hadn’t been killed and left there. They’d gone there of their own accord. A train ran over the bridge then, and the vibration made me start to shake.

Still Water

It seemed funny at the time, but in retrospect it wasn’t funny at all. A gang of jewel thieves who’d gone missing in Stoke had turned up in the Black Country, hiding in a street with no name. It was the late seventies, and there were quite a few anomalies in the local street map: remnants of lost districts that didn’t belong to anywhere and the council hadn’t given them postcodes or kept track of who lived there. In this case, it was a string of old railwaymen’s houses in the poorest part of Aldridge, uninhabited for thirty years at least. A pearl necklace that had been stolen in Derby turned up in a Walsall pawn shop; we traced it to a prostitute who’d got it from some men living out there. She said it was a derelict house.

At that time, I’d been in the force for a year. I was working