4

Four drinks and four pubs later, he was entering the bar of the fifth, when a fat man whose face he knew said hello to him and smiled. These days he tended to avoid people he had known before his block, preferring to talk to strangers, but the man was sitting with two women. Alcohol, sexual deprivation, the feeling the owl had given him that this might be a night of destiny, combined to imbue him now with a spirit of enterprise. He took his drink over and sat down with them.

“How goes it?” the man said, the smile dwindling on his face. Benson knew him now, even remembered his name. It was Morton and he taught in the English Department of the University, where Benson had gone once or twice in happier days to give readings.

“Pauline Rivers,” Morton said. “And Alma Corrigan. This is Clive Benson.”

“How do you do?” Benson had a confused impression of the two women, one fair and buxom, the other small and dark with prominent cheekbones and bright eyes. “How’s life on the campus?” he said looking at Morton.

“Oh, luvverly.” The cockney accent was assumed. Suddenly Benson remembered that Morton was given to assuming accents. He remembered too that he had disliked Morton on the occasions he had met him. He caught the dark woman’s eye. She looked amused, in a slightly combative way. She was not pretty but her face was vivid, the brows strongly marked, the eyes long and narrow with a glittering quality in them. Her mouth was full, sensuous, drawn with some quality of bitterness. “Nobody knows who’s next for the chopper, mate,” Morton said, still in his cockney accent. “We’re in a state of siege, my friend,” he added, in the tones of a BBC announcer.

“That’s quite true,” the woman called Pauline said, laughing at Morton’s mimicry. “Things really are horrendous with these government cuts. Departments are disappearing overnight. Everybody is terrified of being marginalised.”

Benson found it difficult to see her features clearly, as she wore large glasses and her hair fell forward round her face. She had heavy breasts inside a burgundy-coloured jumper. “You don’t need to work in the University to be marginalised,” he said. “Look at me.”

“How’s the writing going?” Morton asked. “Clive writes novels,” he said to the two women, managing to invest this statement too with a sort of jokiness.

All three now looked at Benson who did not yet feel drunk enough to start talking about his block. He did not want to talk to them about the owl either. “It’s not only the University that is in a state of siege, is it?” he said. “I saw a man who couldn’t hold out any longer jump off the battlements in Toxteth.”

He began to tell them about the suicide, soon losing track of the siege idea, reverting to the simple sequence, the leap, the cry, that carpet-like sidling, the gathering fall, the peculiar crash of impact. As he spoke he grew absorbed again with the shape of it, that crude act of self-extinction became in his stammering mouth a paradigm of human life. “That cry and leap from the source of light, that was birth,” he said. “And the sound when he fell, when he hit the ground … Like this,” he said loudly, slapping down a palm, not quite flat on the table top. The blow shook the table and some of Morton’s beer slopped out of his glass. “Steady on, laddie,” Morton said in a Scottish accent.

Benson fell silent, annoyed and discomfited. The manner of Morton’s intervention had made him seem ridiculous, like a bad actor overplaying a part. “Your Scottish accent is lousy,” he said, forcing a smile. The puerility of the retort angered him further. Part of his chagrin was due to shame: he had been claiming through his account of this death some importance for himself. He had been showing off too – for the woman opposite, who had not so far spoken.

She did speak now, quickly, and Benson sensed it was partly at least to protect him. She said, “It’s true in a way, isn’t it? You can’t walk round Liverpool without feeling you’re in a war zone.” The voice was slightly metallic, not much inflected, with a modified Northern accent difficult to place. She glanced impatiently away across the crowded bar, then looked back at their faces. “Sometimes you can even see where the lines are drawn,” she said. “If you happen to live in Liverpool 8, for example, which I don’t, you belong more or less by definition to the poorest and most deprived element in one of the poorest cities in Western Europe. There is a better than fifty-fifty chance you haven’t a job. If you happen to be black it’s more like eighty-twenty. If you are out of a job you haven’t much chance of getting one. You can’t get out because you have no money and nowhere to go. You can’t surrender because they don’t take prisoners. That amounts to a state of siege.”

She fell silent, glancing aside with the abruptness and impatience that characterised her. Benson liked it. He liked everything about her, the pallor of her skin, the straight dark hair, the narrow eyes with their demonic glitter. He liked the way she had sensed his discomfiture. He liked the way she had said ‘happen to’ twice in an attempt to give her obviously excited speech an appearance of nonchalant poise.

“I’m really surprised to hear you say that, Alma,” Pauline said. “You’ll never get a radical movement for change while people are saying, this is Liverpool, look at us, this is a doomed city. Don’t you see, that sort of instant mythologising holds the people back. It is complacent and fatalistic at the same time. We produce our own opium without benefit of religion. Very convenient for the ruling class. This isn’t a Liverpool suicide we’re talking about. We should be angry that these things are allowed to happen in Britain in 1988, that people’s lives are being wrecked everywhere you look by the unbridled forces of capitalism.”

She didn’t seem angry however; she seemed glad to be in a position to correct someone; her voice had been assured and calm, as if she were conducting a seminar.

“Everything is on the plane of transaction with you, isn’t it?” Alma said. “I wasn’t meaning to say that Liverpool is a special case.”

Her tone was defensive. She had been reproved for rhetoric, caught between feeling and orthodoxy in a way Benson might have found funny if he hadn’t felt somehow partly responsible for it. These women were getting cross with each other over a suicide they had never seen. “But Liverpool is a special case,” he said. “All cases are special. The man who jumped was a special case too. You people always want to lump everything together so you can make a political point out of it. If it wasn’t a Liverpool suicide, then it certainly wasn’t a Thatcher suicide either. I suppose people jumped off buildings before this government came to power. It may even happen in Cuba sometimes.” He saw Pauline gathering herself for another statement of principle. “One thing is certain,” he said quickly. “I’ll take a different route from now on.”

“Think what it would mean,” Morton said. “You would have to avoid all high buildings. Then there’s rivers and canals, busy roads, railway tracks.” He paused for a moment then said emphatically and in a sort of Humphrey Bogart accent, “There is no other route, pal.”

Pauline laughed a little at this, in an unwilling and slightly shocked sort of way. Benson wondered vaguely if there were anything between these two. “The suicide rate has risen sharply in all inner city areas over the past ten years,” Pauline said, still smiling at Morton. “Since that woman came to power,” she added.

“The innah cities,” Morton said. “Still, it’s a fact though, they’re jumping all over the place. That sound you described and demonstrated with so much brio just now, bodies colliding with concrete, you hear it everywhere these days. It’s the new version of the Mersey Sound.”

Benson swallowed some whisky. This was his fifth and he was beginning to feel it. He looked at Morton’s face. What you were supposed to think was that under this jocular façade lay deep reserves of compassion. But the eyes seemed cheerful and malicious under their sandy brows. He was looking at someone or something behind Benson. “No thanks,” he said, “there’s no point. We are going soon. You’ve asked us once already.”

Turning, Benson saw a flushed man holding a book of tickets. “Want one?” the man said.

“What’s it in aid of?”

“Only one prize,” the man said. He was drunk and full of joy. “Me giro cheque,” he said. “Winning number gets me giro cheque.”

“What’s that worth?”

“Forty-three pounds seventy.”

“And the tickets?”

“Quid apiece.”

Benson glanced round the bar. It was crowded. There must have been fifty or sixty people in it. And there were two other bars in the place and a pool-room. With luck – and if he stayed sober enough – he might sell a hundred tickets or so. That would give him a hundred pounds for his forty-three, and someone would get forty-three for the expenditure of one. Nothing illegal in it so long as he cashed his own cheque.

“Kelly is the name,” the man said. He smiled widely and held out his hand.

“I’ll have one,” Benson said, shaking the offered hand. “It’s a good cause, isn’t it?” He handed the pound over, tucked the ticket into his top pocket and turned back to meet Morton’s plump smile. “Private enterprise,” he said. “They should approve of that.”

“There you see the true spirit of this city,” Morton said. “You can’t keep them down.” He spoke as if he himself possessed this spirit in abundance.

“His wife and kids won’t see much of it,” Pauline said, with a snap of the lips.

Morton winked at Benson. “Of course,” he said, “this is a very Celtic city.”

“There are Celts and Celts.” Benson thought of drugged Hogan. This was a better way. He looked at Alma. “Like another drink?” he said. He wondered how old she was. Mid-forties somewhere – getting on for twenty years younger.

“We haven’t time,” Pauline said. “We’ve got to go in a few minutes. We are going to a party meeting.”

“Conservative Party, is it?” Benson said. “Or do you belong to Dr Owen’s rump?” None of them seemed amused by this. “Must be a bottle party then,” he said, put out by this priggish silence. “Well, I’m having another.”

When he came back from the bar, Alma was alone at the table. “Bill remembered he had to make a phone call,” she said.

“And Pauline went with him.”

“Oh yes.” She smiled slightly, looking down at the inch or so of beer left in her glass.

It was now that Benson made his big mistake. He said awkwardly, “I hope you didn’t think I was trying to get some advantage just now, when I was talking about that man jumping off.”

She looked up at him. “What advantage?” she said. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Suddenly, with her eyes on him, he didn’t know what he meant either. He said, “The fact is, I took it for a sign. He jumped just as I was passing. Just at that precise moment. It was as if he was waiting for me, waiting till he saw Benson, to plunge out of the light and the silence up there.”

“A sign?” She had an air of heightened interest now but it was not of the kind he had thought to arouse. He saw her brows draw together in a slight frown. She was looking at him attentively. “Are you really saying he did it for your benefit?” she said, in a tone of incredulity and anger. “Are you really saying that?”

“Benefit, I’m not sure,” Benson said. “In the sense of illuminating—”

“I’ve never heard anything so monstrously self-regarding in my life. So all the pain and despair he must have felt, all that waste of a life, it was all simply to provide you with a metaphor?”

Her eyes were brighter than ever. He saw fury in them and the beginnings of contempt. Something, some private sense of recognition, rather alarming, began to stir in him. He remembered the curl of the flame, that flare of green, the winged presence in his room. The bird of night had brought him here. I invoke thee, O Muse.

“Why should death rob life of a lesson?” he said. “Or even a metaphor, for that matter.”

“You don’t see it, do you? I’m not talking about death. It’s life that you are insulting. You can’t insult people with meanings that don’t belong to them.”

“Any meaning belongs to them that they can be made to bear,” Benson said. “Why should it be all right for you to make the man a public symbol, which you just did, and wrong for me to make him a private one?” He saw Morton and Pauline returning from the far end of the bar. He was slightly drunk; he was roused by her contempt; she might be the Muse. The combination broke down his fear of initiatives. “Listen,” he said, “I’ve got an owl in my apartment. Or had. Flying round and round. Would you like to come back with me and see if it’s still there? Don’t say anything to them.”

“It’s not usually owls,” she said. “Another metaphor?”

“A white owl,” he said. “Will you?”

The proposition had not been well-timed. She looked angrier than ever as she got to her feet. She said, “First, I don’t believe you, second, I’m going to a party meeting, third, I wouldn’t go back with you if you had an albatross in your trousers.”

Without looking at him again she moved away to join the others. All three of them were heading for the exit, with Morton bringing up the rear. Benson caught him at the door. “Well, cheerio,” he said. “I hope you have a fruitful meeting. Er, Alma … is she in the English Department too?”

“No, history,” Morton said. He looked for a moment at Benson. “You blew it, didn’t you, pal?” With an instinct of kindness that surprised Benson, he said quickly, “I don’t think she’s attached at the moment.”

Benson went back into the bar to wait for the winning number to be drawn. He didn’t expect it to be his and it wasn’t. Deciding after some internal debate against another drink, he set off walking back to his apartment.

It was just after ten when he returned; he had been away nearly five hours, long enough for a regiment of owls to get away. He felt exhilarated despite the rebuff he had received. A knowledgeable man, Rathbone, he thought. That had really been an excellent idea of his, to wait for the descent of night … It was bitterly cold in the living room and he closed the windows at once. Still with his overcoat on he entered the bedroom and switched on the light. He had perhaps five seconds to register the solemn savagery of the owl’s regard from its place on top of the wardrobe. Then it launched itself in a gathered rush of panic over his head with a whoosh of air as he stood aghast in the doorway. It flew the length of the room and crashed headlong into the glass partition above the entrance door, deceived by the transparent membrane, the dim spaces beyond. Stunned by the collision, it half fell, half fluttered down, coming to rest on its side at the foot of the door. Benson seized it quickly. Holding it against his breast, he opened the door. On the alert for any sign of the Dollingers he carried the bird downstairs. It revived as he did so, he felt the power of its wings. He tightened his grip, feeling the warmth between his hands, the alien weight, the pulse of alarm.

In the dark garden, where the whole business had begun, he stood for some moments in the bitter cold, holding the owl firmly, fingers pressed against the soft feathers at its throat. Below this softness its heart was beating rapidly but it made no sound. Slowly he relaxed his grip on the wings, slowly he opened his palms to make a launching pad. He raised his arms, offering the bird to the night. Its whiteness was incandescent. For a second it rested motionless on the platform his hands had made for it. Then he felt a prick of talons as it launched away, felt that eerie rush of air, saw the creature rise glimmering into the darkness and disappear.