It was the poster that did it, he tells himself. He was having one of his quiet times, with his thoughts only subject to a nervous ripple now and again, like the river surface when the tide is just on the turn, and the Thames does a slow grey boil on the spot, creasing and wrinkling. Manageable.
But then on his day off, the day before yesterday, he was on the Tube, and somewhere when he was changing trains he found himself in front of one of those walls where they’ve stripped off the top layer of the posters ready to paste up something new, and some of the old layers below have ripped away too in strips and gouges. A Tube-palimpsest faced him: a concave slab glue-stippled, mildew-spotted, a dog’s breakfast of previous attractions in thirty-two shades of rotted brightness, showing by the thickness at its edges just how anciently the tunnels are caked with paper. And there on the right a triangle had torn off under which you could see a blocky scarlet capital E and after it a blocky scarlet exclamation mark.
That was all, but he knew what it was. Once seen, impossible to unsee; once recognised, impossible to unrecognise. It was the poster, years gone now but horribly pushing back into the light, for the film called Survive! about the plane crash in South America. Which he’d had to dodge and sidle past for weeks when it came out, always aware of every poster for it, glowing red in the corner of his averted gaze. The poster only had words on it, not pictures, and of course he’d only ever seen (or tried to not see) the poster, not the film itself. Because why would you ever go and see something like that? Why would you ever want to look at people shut up eating each other? If you had a choice, if you could choose not to. Only the poster, then – only a corner of it now – but that was enough. That was enough to end the quiet time in his head. That was enough to set the fear stirring, and start another round of the endless struggle.
He suspected it at once, too. He stood pierced and pinioned in front of the wall, a slight little man nearly forty years old with eyes big and fearful and fists clamped by his sides, till the next train came in and someone jostled him, and the kind crowd released him into motion again along the Bakerloo Line platform. He shook his head like it was a tin with a dried pea in it, and thought maybe he’d been lucky, maybe he’d shaken it back out. It’s only an old poster, what’s there to be afraid of in that? he told himself, and as he said it he nearly believed that he believed it.
But gradually is how the bad times always come on. A thought he can push away, more or less. Then a pause. An ordinary hour, maybe two ordinary hours, in which he seems to be able to forget without effort that there is anything to worry about, except that in the act of reflecting this – reflecting that he is fine, and unworried – he is of course remembering that until now he had successfully forgotten. (Such intricacy; such compelled sidling about it, inside his own head; such long-practised efforts to prove himself unaware by catching himself unawares, this one time more. And this one. And this one, just to be safe.) Yet when he does remember that he had forgotten the fear, and feels compelled to check he isn’t afraid, to make sure he can forget it again, he really isn’t afraid, much. No, hardly at all. No, just the faintest trace, really, surely not enough to worry about, for hours and hours, as he traipses to and fro in his head, checking. (Wearing a kind of trail or groove in his thoughts, or that’s what it feels like.)
Until the moment when on one of these repeating errands, the tenth the twentieth the millionth, he finds that with a malevolent logic all that tramping through the house of himself to check has somehow in itself tramped something in with it, has brought in on the feet of his thoughts an undeniable smear, a spoor. A speckling of blood, of shut up melted fat. And then he has to admit he is afraid. That it is one of the bad times he is coping with here. But surely not a very bad one. Come on, you, out, he says to his fear with, still, an almost convincing confidence. And smirking slightly, mocking slightly, it yields possession, it slinks out, it consents to be banished. But every time for less long, and with more effort.
All through yesterday, he trod around the cycle required to push the fear out, faster and faster. He had to get himself well out of it to sleep last night; and this morning the fear was waiting for him the moment he woke up, or after only the most microscopic pause during which the sun fell on his sore eyelids and was merely itself, and there was nothing wrong, as if he were one of the lucky ones. One uncorrupted photon, mate, one instant of easy natural light; that’s your lot, that’s all you get today. The time before he saw the poster already seemed like another age, a golden one, far away and long ago. On the way to work he was fending, fending, and the fear was jealous now, it didn’t like him paying attention to anything but it. Busy fending, he trusted bare animal consciousness to get him to the garage, pilot him across roads, clock in, nod to Trevor, sling the ticket machine over his shoulder, hop up onto the rear platform of the Routemaster. 36C, Bexford to Queen’s Park, Queen’s Park to Bexford. Oh the mind, the mind has mountains. Cliffs of fall. Hold them cheap if you never dangled there. Hold tight. Hold tight, please.
(Why this? Why is it always this he’s afraid of, why specifically is it the thought of cannibalism, of all things, that the horrors huddle round? He has no idea. A long time ago, before he first got sent to hospital, before he left school even, someone showed him one of the old American horror comics that used to go around, and there was a story in there where the pay-off was that the tramps sitting around the campfire were eating a person. You could see that what was roasting on the flames was a person’s head and part of their ribcage. The flames were coming through the ribs. But, and here’s the thing, it didn’t particularly get to him. He went, yech, in an ordinary way, and pushed the nasty object back at Vernon Taylor without giving him the satisfaction of being upset. And didn’t think about it for, probably, years. It was later on, when he was, what, fifteen or sixteen or so, that certain things got connected that probably shouldn’t of. He threw up at the christening do when his Auntie Madge described his cousin Stephanie’s baby as ‘good enough to eat’. Out of nowhere: just his gorge suddenly rising and the cake he’d swallowed the minute before geysering back up. And then again in the alley next to a Wimpy bar when his sister brought him along on a double date, a shy fourth, and her boyfriend did this whole yum-yum-yum thing of munching up the chip she was holding out and pretending he was going to move on to her finger. The girl who was supposed to be his date, clearly chosen because she was an object of faint pity too, with thick thick glasses, stared at him as he puked. ‘You’re mental, you are,’ she said, and fled. But once he had seen how alike the food adverts and the film posters were, how the camera lingered on the golden brown of a Findus crispy pancake and then lingered on the golden brown of Sophia Loren, he couldn’t stop seeing it. He couldn’t stop seeing how close flesh was to meat, he couldn’t stop thinking of the vileness of a wanting that would destroy what it wanted, that would enjoy by gnawing, tearing, grinding, chewing, swallowing. Was that him? Was that his desire? Was that what he wanted? He didn’t think so, but how could he prove it? He could never quite lay the fear of it to rest after that: and the more careful he was, the more he tried to avoid even the slightest ways in which you could look at girls like food, the guiltier he got, the more unsure of what he might be capable of. And then the ancient EC Comics panel of the human barbecue came floating out of the deeps of memory to give a shape to his fear. It fused to it and never let go. He did not want to eat anyone, he was almost certain. He never had eaten anyone. He had never bitten anyone, never licked anyone, never for that matter kissed anyone. Yet what comfort was that? Turn it and turn it as he liked, study the whole question over and over till it made him want to scream, he couldn’t ever know for sure that he was safe.)
It’s an April morning, blustery and grey and prone to little spitting showers, and both ways on the first trip to Queen’s Park and back they make good time, which Ben is glad of. London’s traffic has moods. The same time of day, and it can be fluid or clotted, easy or jammed. Today the lights go green as they approach the junctions, the mobs of school-bound kids and work-bound adults slip easily on and off the bus, and the moving weave of the vans and the Cortinas and the black cabs seems light and open, somehow. Trevor darts quick and sure through the gaps between the lanes, through London’s gaps, and they fly across Peckham Camberwell Kennington, over the river under a brief oculus in the clouds that strews a rumple of light on the water, and quickly even through the tourist core of the route round Marble Arch, which often sticks. No stickiness now. Ben darts up and down the ridged-wood floor of the two decks, vending tickets in ceaseless motion, making change, giving the double-pull on the cord to the bell in Trevor’s cabin when the platform clears, dodging the hot ends of lit ciggies between the smokers’ seats upstairs, and balancing, balancing without even noticing, as Trevor’s deft kicks to the accelerator bend the gravity inside the Routemaster this way and that. The blue smoke that floats upstairs jerks and reels like one unit, on a sharp corner. Grark go the gear-changes of the big diesel. At junctions, at idle, the floor shudders impatiently, and then smooths into a bass buzz, a rumble, a roar as they pick up speed, till the ground under the rear platform flows past in a blurred grey ribbon. And being in such continuous motion gives Ben something different from what’s in his head to attend to. So long as he doesn’t look down (down inside himself, he means, not physically down, down the curved stairs and out onto the receding tarmac) he can perform a kind of skating from task to task to task. The rhythm of the bus, when it flows, puts a fragile surface beneath him. Each action requires the next action, each bit of compelled speech brings about the need for the next bit of compelled speech, so long as he doesn’t stop to think about it. Fares, please. Where to? Thirty pee, please. Got anything smaller. There you go. Hold tight. Move the bag out the aisle, please. Marble Arch!
It doesn’t banish the fear. You can tell the fear’s there all the time, underneath, gaping. Staying busy just gives him that faint support for his mind. But there’s a trap. (There’s always a trap. Every good way of being, Ben has found, has somewhere in it a hidden door into nightmare, waiting to catch you out.) With the quick moving around the bus, and the conjuring from it of the thin ice to skate across, the trap is that he might be seduced by the ordinariness around him, the ordinariness of his own actions, into believing for an instant that all is well; that he might then make the grievous mistake of thinking he could appeal to the ordinary world and ask it to protect him. If he was going round the Oval, say, and looking out from the top deck at the curving wall of the cricket ground. Hey, you red-faced men in SCCC ties glimpsed for a moment at your shepherd’s pie through a dining room window. Hey, you space of billiard-table green rimmed with hoardings pasted gold for Benson & Hedges. Hey, you row of squats on the far side, with paint like rotting custard, where grungy banners hang. Hey, all you solid things, all you solid world – aren’t I solid too? Couldn’t I be here as straightforwardly as you are? Couldn’t I just trust the day? What is this cannibal shit, anyway? Grievous; fatal; because then he’d be looking at the fear dead-on, and none of that reasonable-sounding stuff has the power to send it away. You can’t disbelieve your way out of a fear when you are, really and truly, afraid. The fear is stronger than him, always. He knows that. All you get for challenging it is panic. Better to keep on the surface, as long as you can; better to skate on and be grateful for what he can get, as he’s grateful now for the swift run up to Queen’s Park and back. The second time they go north, things are slowing, however.
This time at QP, the statutory crew break. Cheese-and-tomato sandwich with curled-up corners, milky coffee in a polystyrene cup, fag sucked so hard it shortens with an audible crackle at every drag. Trevor doing the quick crossword and rolling his eyes at the sight of Ben twitching, pacing, stealing glances at the sky as if something might be hiding in the grey folds up there, which he would invite out if he let his gaze linger. C’mon, off we go. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon. They go in the end. The diesel gives its judder, and out they lurch between the brick pillars. But meantime the weather of the traffic has changed. The weave has tightened, the gaps have sealed, what was smooth and free-running has gone viscous at best, and by Marble Arch the route of the 36C is bumper-to-bumper, and Ben has nothing to do but wait along with the passengers, alone with them on a stationary red island out in the middle of the four-lane gyratory. A rotund businessman the worse for drink works his way out to the bus through the chinks between the cars, making exaggerated and provoking bows of apology to the drivers. Honk honk. Parp parp. Ben offers an arm up and has it smacked away, probably harder than intended. Elephantine pinstripes disappear up the stairs. Ben’s trousers are a child’s size.
Petrol fumes from the cars around gust in through the rear. It’s a smell that’s a taste. It’s a chemical smell. It’s a burnt smell. It’s nearly a cooking smell. Charred ribs. He goes up top and sells a 55p ticket to Fatso, who drops his change all over the floor. Seared flank. Even for the sake of the distraction Ben’s not scrambling about to pick the money up. No one else needs anything. He goes back down. Nothing doing there either. He stands in the little conductor’s alcove at the bottom of the stairs and drums his fingers on the upright chrome of the pole. Ching-ching-ching-ching-ching. Ching-ching-ching-ching-ching. Charred ribs. I’m not going to think of that. Sizzling skin. I’m not going to think about that. Charred ribs. Go away. Arm-fat melting and making the fire spit. O please go away, please please. Charred ribs. Shut up.
He is thinking of those things, though, isn’t he? And once he is, and avoidance has failed, he has to argue, even though he knows it’s no good; even though he recognises, and is sick of, and knows the uselessness of, every single thing he can conceivably say back to this shutup shutup picture of ruined blistering burning hideous cooked shutup flesh. The lights far ahead change, and Trevor manages to creep fifty feet down Park Lane. The trees along the edge of the park thresh. The petrol fumes briefly blow away and then reassert themselves.
All right, says the piping little voice of reason in Ben’s head, those are horrible things, but what have they got to do with you, eh?
Charred ribs.
You’ve never seen any of that stuff, have you, not for real, not even in that film.
No but, it’s not actually happening, is it. You’re only imagining it.
Charred ribs.
It’s just made up. It’s just in your head.
Yeah, exactly, it’s in your head.
So?
Your head and nobody else’s. This is your doing.
No it’s not. I don’t want it, I hate it, I want it gone.
Really? Look at these people. Look at that git in the suit. Look at that girl in the jean jacket. You know the one. Where the buttons heh are under a bit of a strain. Big chest. Lot to button up. Yeah, that one.
Shut up.
You don’t want me to.
I do.
No you don’t. Her; him. D’you think they’re thinking of this stuff ? Course not. It’s just you. You all alone, you evil man, looking at them and thinking of
Shut up shut up
lips puffed and glazed like pork crackling, eyebrows
shut up!
melted to those little dots like the bristles on a roast
stop
eyes cooked white like the eyes on cooked fish
o please stop
Why? This is what you like.
No it isn’t.
Then why’d you think about it? You think about it all the time. You do. It’s on you. It’s your thing. It’s your favourite. You love it.
No I don’t.
Charred ribs, mate, charred ribs.
Red, amber, green. Another fifty feet. Green, amber, red. And repeat. And repeat.
I wish I could take my head off and wash it out with a hose.
Well you can’t.
At last they reach the front of the queue, and get their turn to be pumped through the clogged valve of the junction between the almost-touching angles of Green Park and Hyde Park. New green on the trees dulled by the fumes as if already defeated; scurf of litter in gutters and round the bases of lamp posts, left over from the winter’s bin strike; the triumphal statues and stuff from the old wars looking down at heel, corroded and tatty or choked in black paint. The flow’s not much better beyond, but at least a block of people want to get off, in the blank-walled stretch of road behind Buckingham Palace, and a few more get on, so thank heavens there’s something to do, activity that lasts Ben until Trevor pulls left into the slips of the Victoria bus station, where the red double-deckers wait in rows like clumsy racehorses, between the plastic fascias of the adult bookshop and the betting shop and the all-night caff and the tourist-tat place selling plastic bowler hats with Union Jacks on them on one side, and the echoing cast-iron canopy of the railway terminus on the other. Ben remembers this place from childhood as rather grand: a kind of palace for the steam trains, sooty on every surface, of course, but with gleaming boat trains and Golden Arrow expresses idling at the platforms like pampered monarchs, waited on by scurrying porters. Now its grime is glamourless. It just looks tired in there. Or maybe that’s him. He is tired. The front of his mind jitters fearfully on, but underneath there’s exhaustion waiting like a continental shelf. When days like these finally consent to end, he slips past the sentries of terror into dim depths of fatigue, and gratefully dissolves there. He’s yawning now.
Thanks to the clotting of the traffic, they’ve caught up at Victoria with the buses that should’ve been ahead on the route, and are now the back one in a row of four 36s. Trevor turns off the engine, and steps out to lean against the cab and have a smoke. It’s getting on for teatime.
‘Other ones’ll be leaving first,’ says Ben to the chuntering passengers.
‘Move on up to the 36 at the front if you don’t wanna wait. Yeah, you can use the same ticket.’ Most get off, leaving only a nun on the longwise bench seats downstairs who seems as patient as a statue, and upstairs a harassed-looking woman with three young kids who presumably can’t face the palaver of moving them. Also the git in pinstripes is still there, slumped red-faced against a window and snoring.
‘Oi,’ says Ben, ‘wakey-wakey. Victoria!’ Nothing. Louder: ‘Mister? Victoria. This your stop?’ Still nothing. Ben’s not going to shake him, prod him or otherwise touch him; he doesn’t touch people, if he can help it. Almost shouting: ‘Sir! Sir! Is this your stop?’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ rumbles a voice of treacly grievance, without the puce eyelids opening, or the jowls shifting from where they’re squidged against the glass. ‘Go away, bus-wallah. Go ’way. My business where I get orf.’
‘Your funeral, squire,’ says Ben, backing off. ‘Don’t blame me if you wake up in the depot.’
And this little bit of righteous defiance gives him enough fuel to go down and stand next to Trev and smoke a fag of his own in fierce sucks and endure the couple of minutes till the other 36s have moved off and it’s time to get going again. The fear sends needles of dread through him, almost playful. It knows it has him; it can afford to wait patiently to see how he fails next in the struggle to get rid of it.
Off again. Rumbling down through Pimlico to Vauxhall Bridge. Traffic at least in jerky motion. A party of posh kids upstairs, aged fifteen or sixteen, presumably just finished school, all puffing away on Silk Cut and looking as if they’re enjoying the conscious wickedness more than the taste. Goodbye to the nun; hello to weary office cleaners coming off a shift that started at dawn, and a middle-aged woman wearing a carefully maintained outfit that hasn’t been in fashion for a decade. She raises her eyebrows at the posh boys, but as if she’s entertained by them, not tutting at them. They and she get off just before the Thames, at the stop for the Tate Gallery. The harassed mum gets off beyond the river, by Vauxhall station, and she needs Ben’s help manoeuvring the pushchair and her bags down the stairs. He manages to do this without making any skin contact with her good enough to eat offspring. And all the while, Ben is working, working in his head, having decided though you know it never works to look away from the fear; to starve it of the oxygen of his attention. Everything he does, he now does with an extra zeal or maybe just desperation, grabbing at its scope to fill his gaze. His mind’s eye’s gaze, that is. To blissfully ordinary eyes, such as other people’s, he might seem to be doing exactly the same things as on the northbound journey, when he was resisting the fear by skating the flow. But this is quite different; a different strategy altogether. Instead of not looking, and asking no questions, he is now actively refusing to look. He has turned away from the fear, inside himself, and is making himself go on facing away from it. Mentally facing away. There it is behind him, murmuring away, trying to send around tendrils of charred ribs alarm into the edges of his vision. But he won’t look, he won’t won’t won’t. He will not think of it. He will not-think of it. He is putting out anti-thought where it is concerned. He is charred ribs forgetting it, he is refusing it, he is turned away. He is chanting la-la-la-la-la-la. He is winning, he is winning, he is charred ribs not winning. The trouble is that it’s not safe to turn your back on a frightening thing. Every animal knows this. Every animal would rather be facing the predator than feeling it pacing about behind them somewhere, preparing to spring. Not knowing where it is is worse, even, than seeing it closing on you with charred ribs teeth bared. If you were walking on a lonely road at dusk and you felt that something was following you, its presence betrayed by ambiguous movements just at the margins of your sight, black shifting on black, grey flexing on grey, you’d turn, wouldn’t you; you’d turn to check. You’d swing around, hoping to be wrong; and till you did, you’d feel the tug of your fear urging and urging you to, taking priority as the sense of danger always does. This is like that, except, of course, that the lonely road and the monster following, the cornered mouse and the stalking cat, are all in Ben’s head, and none of this is visible to anyone else on the bus. There’s just the fine-boned little man in the grey polyester jacket with the conductor’s badge, quick-stepping about with sweat on his forehead and his eyes as wide as a lemur’s. No one can tell. No one can help. It’s his head, and he’s locked inside it forever and ever, till kingdom come, amen.
And not long after they’ve passed the Oval again, having deposited the last of the posh central London custom and picked up the wodge of travellers who’ve come up from the Tube there needing transport east into the Tubeless wastes of the city’s lower half, he gives in and turns round. He was right. The fear was behind him, just behind him, and CHARRED RIBS it roars in his face.
‘Sorry?’
‘I said, Peckham Rye.’
‘Right. Sorry. Twenty, please.’
He’d almost welcome it if the fear would actually pounce, if that would be the end of it. If it were possible to actually surrender to it in some final way, and let it (appropriately enough) crunch him up. A willing step forward, and then the whole thing over with. But that’s not its way. It isn’t substantial enough to make an end of him, only to keep him never-endingly afraid. (Though there are better days than this: a fact he struggles to believe, on a bad day.) Now, stared at, it falters momentarily. Just for a moment, it resolves into its constituent elements, like a looming figure in a dark bedroom that flicks back into being a pile of clothes on a chair. Just for a moment, as if the lighting has changed or something like that, Ben can see that his monster is only made of the ancient memory of a horror comic’s page, a teenage anxiety about what it means to want someone, an ordinary distrust gone septic. It’s as if a far-off window has opened. Not in this room, nor in the next, but somewhere; down some dark L-shaped corridor, perhaps, and across a landing, and up some stairs, but eventually to a chamber in the house of the self where a long-stuck casement has opened outwards, and let in an unexpected breath of air. Oh, says some tiny part of Ben. Charred ribs? offers the monster, pathetically. For a second, he could almost laugh.
But the terrible truth is that these occasional moments of release are familiar too. They too are part of the familiar round, the long churning, of Ben’s fear, and they do not seem to help much. They certainly do not end it. Maybe they are another of the fear’s tricks and traps, maybe they are something else. But they go away, and the struggle resumes. So now, since he is staring at the fear anyway, Ben wearily switches to the opposite tactic, and tries to pin it with his stare: to look at it so unflinchingly, before it can regroup, that it will be unable to account for itself, and be forced to shrivel away. Not that this has ever worked either.
Meanwhile, rumbling up the long straight of Camberwell New Road towards the junction with Walworth Road and the green, they’ve picked up some unwelcome cargo, a group of skinheads who go tramping up the back stairs in their big boots and occupy the whole front of the upper deck. The normally raucous school-kids who get on at the green and after for their journey home to Peckham take a look from the top of the stairs and prudently retreat, though a couple with Rock Against Racism badges shout something once they’re safely on the pavement. Two art student girls in dungarees and a boy with long hair on one side and a clip-job on the other move downstairs. Soon the top deck pretty much belongs to the British Movement, and everyone else on the bus – the hardy pensioners at the back upstairs, the overcrowded contingent filling the downstairs, Trevor in the cab – is nervously aware of the field of aggro being generated there. Except Ben; Ben, pushing through the crush in the lower-deck aisle, double-tinging the cord for departures, vending away like a contortionist, has other things on his mind.
What are you? What even are you, really?
You know what I am.
No I don’t. Or anyway, I don’t know why I have to be afraid of you.
Ooh, in’t he brave!
I haven’t done anything, have I? I haven’t actually eaten anyone, have I? You’re some pictures in my head, that’s all.
Uh-huh?
I’m going to look at those ribs on that fire straight on. Go on, give me all you’ve got.
Charred ribs?
Hah! Nothing there! You’re nothing, you’re not made of anything, you’re literally just fear.
Charred ribs.
I look at you, and you can’t do anything, can you?
Charred ribs.
Ha ha. That’s it, is it? You’re a one-trick fear, ain’tcha. You poor—
Look away, then.
Eh?
If you’re so safe, look away.
I could.
You will. You’ll have to, in the end. You’re only safe as long as you’ve stared me into stillness. But you can’t keep me frozen, you know that. You’ll blink. Your eyes are getting tired already. You’ll look away. And then—
Shut up.
Brave Ben. Fearless Ben. Heroic Ben. Whose mind is a barbecue in hell.
Shut up.
I can feel you’re going to blink, I can feel it, here it comes, here it comes—
Ben has climbed the stairs without noticing. Has vended, on automatic pilot, two 10p fares to the pensioners tucked at the back. Now blunders forth up the surprisingly clear aisle towards a group he hasn’t clocked as anything more particular than his next task, because inside he has indeed blinked, reeled, looked away, and had the fear flash out roaring with the more power for having been temporarily confined, and fill all but a tiny leftover rind of his sensorium with dripping fat, bubbling skin, disgusting smells of roasting flesh, which expertly weave together with the blood smell that really is coming in through the windows just here on the route, where the 36C passes between the massed streetside butcher’s stalls of Peckham: and while the British Movement (Bexford branch) idly watch him come, to see if there’s any entertainment in the little pipsqueak’s attempt to make them pay, he doesn’t pay them any attention at all. A crescendo is taking place in his head.
CHARRED RIBS CHARRED RIBS CHARRED RIBS CHARRED RIBS CHARRED RIBS CHARRED RIBS CHARRED RIBS shut up CHARRED RIBS CHARRED RIBS oh please CHARRED RIBS CHARRED RIBS shut up shut up shut up
‘Any more charred ribs fares, please?’
‘No thank you my good charred ribs I think we’d rather you charred ribs your little ticket machine up charred ribs if you would be so charred ribs.’
A vague impression of the grinning mask of the largest and oldest of the skins.
‘Sorry,’ says Ben, ‘I didn’t quite charred ribs catch that?’
‘I said,’ the skinhead begins again patiently, winking at his friends, ‘that we charred ribs charred ribs charred ribs CHARRED RIBS CHARRED RIBS CHARRED RIBS—’
Shut up shut up shut up, cries Ben desperately inside his head, and then, entangled by the confusion of inner and outer, without even noticing the difference yells out loud:
‘Oh just fucking shut up why can’t you! Shut up, shut up, shut up!’
There is a moment of startled silence. Then the lead skin rises to his feet, with his shoulders up against the curved yellow enamel of the roof and his head bent over towards Ben’s face.
‘You what?’ he says, quietly, delicately.
Something like a jolt of belated adrenalin goes through Ben, a chemical alert for real-world problems from a system neglected and overruled most of the time in favour of the hateful blizzard blowing in his psyche, but still just about operational and now insisting successfully on his attention. His vision clears. Or rather, what he has been seeing all along is permitted to register. The man whose face is in his face is a rangy, graceful, liquidly moving predator, on whom the shaved scalp does not produce the effect of scabby babyhood which can be seen in his two much younger male mates, or on the pinch-faced woman beside him, shrunken-looking and minimally female in her Aertex shirt, who is staring up at Ben with a peculiar expression on her face as if she recognises him. On him, the suede-fuzzed curves of skull have the heft of a weapon – the weighted, rounded surface at the back of a well-balanced ball-peen hammer, for example. His smile is jovial, his eyes are deep blue and fringed with pretty lashes, and his clothes are perfect for what they are. The wide bands of the red braces, the crisp white Fred Perry shirt, the jeans the exact right shade of blue faded almost to white, the boots tied immaculately with fat red laces. He puts a finger out to the crumpled grey lapel of Ben’s polyester uniform jacket, just under the round identity badge with his number on it, and stirs contemptuously at the cheap cloth. The top of Ben’s head comes to somewhere under his collarbone. The two of them must be pretty much of an age, but beside this pumped, gleaming, comfortably aggressive animal, Ben is a scrap, a wisp, an anxious little fleck of gristle.
‘Yeah?’ says the skinhead.
I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m dead, supplies the rusty subsystem of Ben’s brain devoted to physical survival, and he’s surprised to find he minds the idea. It isn’t a relief after all. But he hasn’t a notion what to do about it; what to say, to turn wrath aside. His mouth hangs stupidly open, with his vulnerable herbivore’s teeth on display.
‘Someone’s-gunna-get-their, fuckin-head-kicked-in; someone’s-gunna-get-their, fuckin-head-kicked-in,’ chant the young male sidekicks, happily.
‘Oh, leave it out, Mike,’ says the woman. ‘Look at the poor little bugger.’
Mike doesn’t look at Ben. He closes the pointing hand round Ben’s lapel, to keep him in place, and turns to look at her instead, sour irritation spoiling his mouth.
‘I told you,’ he begins.
But then the Routemaster judders to a halt, and Trevor, who has been watching through the periscope from the cab and looking for somewhere to pull over, jumps down, runs round the back, and is up the passenger stairs three steps at a time. Trevor is six foot three and won a heavyweight title while he was in the merchant navy. He is also a deacon in the Joyful Assemblies of the Holy Spirit: but he doesn’t feel he is under an obligation to spell out his commitment to the path of heavenly peace in situations where the greater good would be served by keeping shtum.
‘Let go of my conductor, man, and get off my bus,’ he says: and his voice is a London-Jamaican rumble, full of the bass warning notes of one big beast addressing another.
‘Oh look, it’s the organ grinder,’ says Mike, switching his attention with relish to the larger and more promising target. ‘Or is it? Which is which, eh? Which one’s the organ grinder, and which one’s—’
‘Get off my bus. Now.’
‘You can’t do that, we got rights,’ says one of the younger boys, too adenoidal for menace.
‘Carriage of passengers is at the discretion of driver and conductor,’ rumbles Trevor, not taking his eyes off Mike. ‘London Transport by-laws. Hop it.’
But the other two skins are strategically irrelevant at this point. Without meaning to, Ben is blocking them from standing up. If they push him, they’ll just push him into the immovable obstacle of Trevor. It’s all between Trevor and Mike: the other two, like the woman, like Ben, are just audience.
Mike has thrust his face forward, right into Trevor’s. He is a bit shorter, but the way the bus roof forces them both to stoop leaves them on a level, nose to nose, brow to brow, Mike’s pale warhead of a profile up against Trevor’s sculpture in unyielding dark wood. They look as if they’re about to rub noses, like New Zealand rugby players do; or like one of those optical illusions where you either see two faces or the vase made by the space between. Trevor’s face has got no expression on it but refusal, while Mike is gleeful, enjoying himself to an extent Ben doesn’t really get. His mouth is open and his tongue is as red as his braces. The veins on his forehead are standing up. His hand, however, is in his jeans pocket, fishing for a hard lump the size and shape of a Stanley knife.
‘Mike, don’t,’ says the woman; and although her voice is drab and exhausted-sounding, it seems to have the power to reach him all the same, twisting his face into a spasm of irritation. Not collected, not self-possessed: a why-do-you-always-fuck-things-up-for-me? expression.
‘Fuck it,’ says Mike, to the floor, and then, into Trevor’s face with a shower of spit, ‘Lucky! Your lucky day! C’mon, then.’
As he goes he tries to shoulder aside Trevor, who has stepped back an ironically courteous six inches or so: but Trevor is planted, and gives no more ground to the shove than a plank would. Mike, followed by the woman, followed by the boys, moonstomps his way up the aisle, kicks a dent in the tin of curved stair-guard, and can be heard clomping down and off. There’s a muffled cry of ‘White power!’ from the pavement. Then they’re gone.
One of the pensioners applauds, not ironically. Trevor wipes his face with a hanky.
‘We’ll be on our way again in a moment, ladies and gentlemen,’ he declares to the top deck. Then to Ben, much more quietly, ‘Ain’t you got no sense at all?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Ben whispers.
‘Man! “Lucky” was right. I don’t know what you said to him, but look: you get yourself in trouble like that, you’re getting me in it too, and I don’t want to go home with no holes in me.’
‘I didn’t … mean to.’
‘I don’t suppose you did,’ says Trevor. ‘You’d be the last one I’d figure for picking fights. Off in a damn dreamworld, that’s you.’
‘Oh, come on, driver,’ says the pinstriped drunk, who has just woken up and sees nothing but the bus crew chatting. ‘Chopchop!’
‘Hold your horses,’ says Trevor, but he breaks the gaze he has locked on to Ben’s face. ‘You and me are not finished talking about this,’ he tells Ben. ‘At the garage, we are going to have some words.’
He sighs and heads back downstairs.
‘I was on your side,’ says the old dear at the back who clapped, as he passes. ‘Because you coloured fellas have such lovely manners.’
‘Thanks, darling,’ says Trevor after a fractional pause, and disappears down the stairwell with his eyebrows raised.
There is a kind of stunned calm inside Ben’s head as the Routemaster shakes itself back into life and they chug on through the rest of the route. Queen’s Road, New Cross, Lambert Street, Bexford Hill, Bexford Garage. The long views back towards the cluttered basin of the city winch themselves free from the rooftops as they make the last leafy-green climb. The squalls of April rain are visible over there as little patrolling smudges, trailing tentacles of darkness over the wastelands where the docks used to be. It’s not a total calm inside him: he can feel that the fear is still there, faintly alive down in a sub-basement, and will be heard from again when the real-world shock has had a chance to recede. But it’s quieter than it ever is, pretty much, even on one of the good days. Meanwhile, and this is the thing that is enforcing the quiet, he can feel that his legs are like water, his chest is aching, his forehead is damp, his hands are cold and clumsy. His whole weak, skinny, urban-ape body is insisting minute by minute on its reality and vulnerability, is demanding that he notice for once that it is more than a container to tote his horrible thoughts around. It’s him, himself: the thing itself, the man itself, the ‘I’ itself, to all of whom something bad nearly happened. Your fingers are as real as your thoughts, his fingers are telling him. Realer, in fact. It’s an astonishing sensation, and to be honest not at all a pleasant one. Because if someone, some fairy godmother, had propositioned him up front and said, You can have a break from the fear inside, at the price of being frightened out in the world – well, he’d have taken the deal, wouldn’t he, like a shot; and he’d have done it thinking, as he always tends to think when in the grip of his fear, that the alternative to what grips him is some unimaginable, infinitely desirable state of calm. Compared to which a bit of skinhead-induced agitation would be a piece of piss. A straightforward bargain. But it’s not like that at all. The thing that has been strong enough to silence those charred ribs isn’t a perfect peace but another, stronger, more pressing emotion. Perhaps if he wants not to live in his private barbecue hell he has to consent to fill his life up with all the things he’d feel, many not nice, if he let his life have events in it. Large, vague, alarming thoughts stir: perhaps it is the emptiness of his life that gives hell houseroom, perhaps it is even his wish for peace that does it. Perhaps all this time he has been somehow hugging his hell to himself. Like the cruising clouds that smudge the grey levels of the London air, these are ideas without edges, that melt into the general sky as you draw close. And since they are disturbing, as well as hard to hold on to, they will probably blow by, as will Ben’s guilt at what he nearly made happen to Trevor.
Bexford Garage. Their Routemaster slotted into the oilyfloored brick barn, the toad in pinstripes tottering away baffled, clutching his puce brow and clearly with no idea where he is. Thanks to the jams, the return trip took so long it’s shift-end for Ben and Trevor. As soon as he’s dropped off the machine and the cash bag in the office and clocked out, Ben makes an attempt to slip away, seeing as over by the exit onto the East Hill he can see Rodney hanging about, waiting to sell him his regular solution to the problems of sleep and the night-time. But Trevor corners him in the red alley between their Routemaster and its neighbour.
‘So, what was that about, then?’ he demands.
‘I dunno,’ says Ben uncomfortably. ‘I’m not. I. I think I told him to shut up.’
‘You think you did?’
‘I was thinking of something else.’
‘But why’d you tell him that?’
‘I dunno.’
‘No, man, you do. Come on, out with it.’
Impossible to explain that he wasn’t speaking to the skinhead at all.
‘He said something to me. But I’m not sure what it was.’
‘How can you not—? Never mind. Okay, what d’you think it was, this terrible thing?’
‘I wasn’t really paying attention, you see. But I think he told me to stick my ticket machine up my arse.’
Having said this out loud, having put it out there in the conversation, and finding that fear has flipped over into absurdity, Ben suddenly gets the giggles, and it’s infectious; Trevor starts to laugh too, and for a moment they rock to and fro together between the buses.
‘Right, then,’ says Trevor. ‘Right. I see it now. Okay.’ He swallows his last chuckle. ‘And you lost your temper, right? Probably out of the blue, just like that, am I right?’ He snaps his fingers. ‘And you’re not an angry guy, are you, so I’m guessing you got not too much practice at keeping your temper, or getting it back when it’s gone all of a sudden like that. Now, the thing here is …’
And he launches into a speech which Ben guesses is probably a version of the advice that Deacon Trevor gives to young fighters at some boxing club or other, about how to keep your cool under pressure; or maybe to his own sons. It’s very well meant, and Ben has no idea how to tell him that it’s completely off-target. So he just goes quieter and quieter, waiting for the talking-to to end, and for his chance to go. You and I need to be alone together again, says the fear. And Trevor sees this, and grows puzzled and frustrated again.
‘Where’ve you gone, man? I thought we was understanding each other.’
And it’s at this point that Rodney, tired of hanging about, appears at the end of the metal alleyway in his unconvincing tam and his green khaki jacket with ASWAD written on it in marker pen, holding out Ben’s regular order of an eighth of Leb in its little baggie.
‘Go away, man, we’re talking,’ says Trevor.
‘I and I jes’ here to do a little business,’ says Rodney.
‘What?’ says Trevor.
‘Ya know, the holy herb.’
‘What?’ says Trevor. ‘That’s the worst Rastaman imitation I ever heard. Where’d you learn it from, listening to records?’
‘All right, all right, Grandad,’ says Rodney, trying to sidle past. ‘Just tryin’ to show some appreciation. Roots and culture, know what I mean?’
‘Not your bloody culture. Newsflash! You’re a white boy, boy. And take that shit away. You don’t want to be messing with this one’s head. He’s enough of a mess already. Look at him!’
Trevor isn’t even looking at Ben himself at this point, he’s just getting rhetorical because he’s getting exasperated, and while he does so Ben snatches the eighth, shoves a blue fiver into Rodney’s mitt in exchange, and scarpers, leaving Trevor making tooth-sucking noises of despair.
Across the road, past the old Odeon, boarded up now, around two corners, loping along on sore feet. The fear beginning to wake up, just as he knew it would charred ribs but at last with some medicine in hand for it, a reliable dose of mind-softening ahead to look forward to. Through the door of his sister’s house, fumbling with the keys; past her daughters doing their homework in front of the telly; refusing his tea; up the stairs and into his room, and bolt the door. And skinning up with his clumsy hands, and the flame sputtering on the little lumps of resin in the tobacco; and then the oily, thick, oblivious smoke, bringing a pause at last to today’s twenty rounds with the demon.
So many days like this.
‘No, leave it, I’ll do that,’ says Alec as Sandra starts automatically collecting up the cereal bowls.
‘You sure?’ she says, raising an eyebrow. He’s making an effort, but he’s not normally Mr Domestic.
‘Yeah, fine, my meeting’s not till ten and then I’m not on the picket till one. I’m a gentleman of leisure, me.’
‘Well, all right. Thanks, love.’
With a kind of twitch, she detaches herself from the groove of her usual tasks, and goes through into the hall to find her bag and put on her coat. He can hear the slither of fabric over fabric as the coat underneath hers falls off the peg, and has to be picked off the floor. Then she comes back to the kitchen to do her face in the mirror by the door, where the light is stronger. She lifts her chin and turns it from side to side as she does her cheeks, grimacing at herself with that weird objectivity women have when it comes to their own faces. Pout-stretch-blot with the lipstick. A bit sticks to a front tooth and she reaches a quick hand for a Kleenex to get it off. She’s got big front teeth, always has had; nicely racehorsey to go with her long, lean body, Alec thinks. He can remember her teeth and his teeth banging into each other the first time they kissed, in the bus shelter by Bexford Park it must be (good grief) twenty years ago. She must be changing with time, he supposes. Nearly-forty Sandra with two teenage sons can’t be the same as the eighteen-year-old with the hair-flip. But you don’t see it, do you, if you live with someone, if you see them all the time? The changes are too gradual. Or, more than that, the changes are additions not displacements, only ever doing their work on top of memory, in all its layers and layers. The girl doesn’t go away, she just gets added to. Maybe it goes on like that, he thinks. Maybe that’s what’s happening, he thinks, when you come across one of those pensioner couples down the pub who are all handsy with each other. Everyone thinks it sweet they’re still so devoted, considering the wrinkles and his arthritis and her having a bum as big as a barrel, but maybe they just don’t see those things. Maybe to them, the wrinkles et cetera are details to be brushed aside, because from their point of view they still fundamentally are the courting teenagers who started mashing tongues in the bus shelter in 1925.
‘Phwoar,’ he says gently, joking and not joking, teasing and not teasing, and reaches an arm for her hips.
She gives him a V-sign with her free hand, and skips out of the way. The Co-op checkout calls. She never had to have a job, before. She was busy with the boys, and Fleet Street wages gave them all a pretty good life. They talked about her going back to work, but without ever getting to the decision point. Now, with Alec on seventy quid a week strike pay, they suddenly need her to be earning, and she’s kind of enjoying, Alec would say, being back in the world. Having a bigger life than the family. She talks about people on the tills with her who he’s never met. But then he supposes he’s been passing on composing-room gossip to her for years which makes just as little sense.
‘I’m off, then,’ she says, coming back and ruffling his hair. ‘Be good.’
‘Also,’ he says carefully, ‘I thought I might try and have a word with the lazy lump upstairs – you know, if he surfaces.’
‘Oh, love,’ she says, frowning. ‘Is there any point going round it again? You just set each other off.’
It’s true that Alec being in the house more seems to mean more collisions between him and Gary. He and his older boy form an unstable mixture, it seems, liable to combust. The two of them must have depended more than they knew on Sandra acting as interpreter and go-between. Face to face, things go swiftly wrong. But Alec isn’t ready to give up on the idea of reaching him; of finding the right tool to jiggle open the mysteriously jammed lock of Gary, who not long ago, surely, was being helped to balance round by the garages on his orange Chopper.
‘I will walk on eggshells,’ he promises.
‘Hmm,’ she says, unconvinced. But she’s got to go. She kisses him and departs; and thirty seconds after the door’s clicked, and he’s dumping bowls in the sink, he sees her head go by above the trellis on the back wall of the pocket-sized garden, taking the short cut down towards Lambert Street and the shops. Just her head, with her straight fair hair flying, moving in quick jerks that mean she’s taking her long, downhill, almost-bounding strides, also unaltered (thinks Alec) from the girl who won the hundred yards at Bexford Secondary Modern and moved as if less secured to the ground by gravity than other people. She looked like a gazelle in running shorts. Such legs she had. Has. Had. Whichever. Her expression, though, thirty seconds away from him, has cooled, and gone resolute, and public, and unbetraying.
‘Private faces in public places,’ quotes Alec, adding too big a squirt of Fairy Liquid to the washing-up bowl, ‘are wiser and nicer than public faces in private places.’
The sink grows a loaf of foam. Alec roots about in it for the crockery and the cutlery, and brings up each item he finds, one by one, for a careful scrub. He has to run the mixer tap hard to get the foam off again, and even then when he piles the clean dishes on the drainer they all have a slightly bubble-tufted appearance which doesn’t look right. He picks up the whole rack and tries to fit it under the mixer tap for a final rinse, but it won’t fit on top of the plastic bowl. He transfers the rack to balance on just his right arm, and uses the other to tip the bowl out. He has nowhere to put the bowl, though; if he puts it on the draining board, he can see that it will immediately foam up his post-foam recovery area. He squats and leans, and props the bowl down on his Hush Puppies – half on them, anyway – to try to keep the foam off the floor. He straightens, and with his left hand turns on the cold water to wash out the sink itself, also foam-bound. When enough seems to have gone down the drain, he manoeuvres the draining rack and its cargo under the flow and starts to sluice it. Success! The foam residue washes off the washing-up with pleasing promptness. But he tips the rack too far, and the bowls and saucers at the end start to slide off into the sink, and when he hastily tips the rack the other way, he overshoots, and crockery bounces off the other end onto the floor, while an icy jet shoots out of the undercarriage of the rack and squirts the leg of his jeans. He starts to laugh, and more bowls slide off the rack – bouncing not breaking on the floor, luckily, since they’re melamine.
There’s a sound from upstairs. Alec looks at the ceiling, and stops laughing. He picks up the mess, replaces the bowl, rewashes more efficiently. He finds a mop in the tall cupboard and sorts out the floor. All of this he does with a degree more clatter than he could have managed. But when the washing-up is really, truly, definitively done, and he squints at the ceiling again, there are no follow-up noises. He turns on the radio on the windowsill and gives the kitchen a dose of Radio 1. Still nothing.
So he puts the kettle on and makes Gary some tea. It occurs to him that he doesn’t know how Gary likes it, so he puts in one sugar, as the low-risk, consensus option, and carries the mug to the upstairs of the maisonette. It’s dim up there, he discovers as his head rises above the level of the swirly carpet on the landing. With the door of his and Sandra’s bedroom shut, and the shade still down in the bathroom to shield Sandra’s shower from being on view to the road, and Stevie’s door open but the curtain left closed when he went off to school, it’s as if the night hasn’t shifted upstairs, is still hanging about, a murk as thick as flannel pyjamas only softly punctured here and there by light, and smelling strongly of boy. Really strongly, in fact, now that Alec’s nose has been by purged by Fairy Liquid and is getting the chance to smell his household afresh. It smells of used Y-fronts and other teenage male laundry, and spray-on Brut 33, and spot lotion, and the general reek of newly exuding armpits and groins. Of, probably, (disgusting word, but useful for winning at Scrabble) smegma. S-m-e-g-m-a. The only feminine thing putting up a fight in the mix is the floral smell of Sandra’s shampoo.
Christ, she really is alone in the zoo with us, thinks Alec. It’s a wonder she doesn’t reel out of the house in the morning coughing and gagging.
He puts down the mug on the post at the end of the banisters and opens doors, draws curtains, opens windows, imagining a cleansing gale blowing through from end to end. Out on the other side of the Rise he can see the new green on the big trees starting to cover up the frontages of the big old houses over there. The part they live in is modern infill, presumably where a bomb wiped out the Georgian symmetry. It’s the only new bit, and the only comfortable bit. The behemoths opposite are all dusty-windowed multi-occupancy nightmares, full of art students, old people with a hundred cats, and bewildered Nigerians. Though there are one or two being done up – the ones with a Saab or a 2CV parked outside. A little bit of April rain spatters on the tilted glass. The April air, on the other hand, pushes hesitantly inside a few inches, doesn’t fancy it, withdraws. Oh well. He’s wasting time anyway, he knows he is; his watch says it’s nearly nine now, and he ought to be heading for the bus stop himself soon if he’s going to make the meeting on time. Now or never, Dad. He picks up the mug, knocks on the last unopened door on the crowded landing and, getting no answer, pushes into Gary-land.
In the sweaty dark, ancient-looking suits bought from charity shops hang on walls, plus one, two, three pork-pie hats, equally vintage. There’s a record player and a row of LPs but not a single book. The shelves Alec put up have shoes on them. His firstborn child is sprawled under a duvet and, as ever, Alec’s first reaction is to be startled by the boy’s bulk. Alec is stringy, Sandra is a lovely greyhound. Gary is brawny, blubbery almost, with big slabby shoulders and a seam of flesh around his jaw that could easily grow into a double chin. Who the hell does he take after? Where did he come from, this junior Mussolini?
‘Cup of tea for you, son,’ says Alec.
Gary doesn’t answer or open his eyes but he goes still. His mouth is set, his brows are slightly clenched. Alec is almost certain he’s awake.
‘Gary?’
There’s a pause, as if Alec’s voice has a long way to go to reach the relevant authorities. Down corridors the message goes, up stairs, till at last it reaches the Department of Irritating Dad, where a functionary will consent to look at it, and sigh.
‘What,’ says Gary in the end.
‘I was wondering if you’d had a chance to look at that brochure? From the college? With the list of courses?’
‘No,’ says Gary.
‘Well, you should, when you’ve got a moment.’
‘Huh,’ says Gary.
‘There’s all sorts in there. Graphic arts. Carpentry. Electrical.’
‘Dad,’ says Gary.
‘You could take your pick. Decide where you wanna end up, and then work out what you need to get there.’
‘Dad!’ says Gary, still without opening his eyes, but with a sort of thick anger gathering in his voice.
‘What?’
‘I don’t need to go on a course. I’ve told you!’
‘Well, you need to do something, don’tcha?’ says Alec, feeling his own irritation kindle helplessly. ‘You’re lying in bed in the middle of the day. If you’re not going to stay in school, fine, but then you need to learn a trade. You need to get off your arse and—’
‘I’m asleep!’ bellows Gary. ‘I. Am. A. Bloody. Sleep!’ And in an infuriated convulsion he draws up his big feet, pulls the duvet over his head and disappears. The interview is clearly terminated. But to make this doubly plain, a second later Gary’s arm snakes out and he stabs the On button of his clock radio. Capital Radio at full volume fills the room, Kenny Everett howling like a camp banshee.
Alec retreats. His own anger fills him: his chest is tight with it, his fingers clench. He thumps down the stairs and ditches the tea mug in the sink. It slops as it goes, and he makes himself wipe it up neatly, and squeeze out the cloth, and rinse the mug. But peace does not return, his breath still comes quick and angry, the song, whatever it is, comes through the ceiling. Everyone knows that parenthood changes you: but he’d thought that meant the rearrangement that comes at the beginning of it, when you learn that your life is going to be curled protectively around the kids. He doesn’t know what to do with this recent, new rage, where you feel the pattern of hopes and expectations you’ve had for them all this time start to shrivel and unpick, at their initiative; where they let you know that they don’t want, or apparently even understand, what you want for them; where the story of their lives you’ve been telling yourself, with chances you’d’ve liked, and a step up you’d’ve been glad to take, turns out to be nothing like their own story of themselves. The homework carefully done with Gary – the projects, with the little light bulbs and the batteries and the wires – all gone. Gary doesn’t want that. Gary wants— Oh, who knows what Gary wants. Little bastard. Idle, ignorant, ungrateful little bastard. He’s not going to calm down in here, is he; and he should be on his way. Sweater, windbreaker, book in the pocket. But he shuts the front door with a demonstratively controlled click: no slam.
The meeting is in the NUFTO Hall on the corner of Jockey’s Fields, just in the lee of Gray’s Inn itself. When Alec gets off his bus, he finds himself in a swirl of barristers, wigged and gowned, being loaded into a fleet of black taxis along with box after box of documents. This is the funny thing about this part of London, this particular compartment of the city. At the south end of Gray’s Inn Road, you’ve got this enclosed playground for the lawyers, with its paths and trees and stately facades, like an Oxford or Cambridge college parked in reach of the Old Bailey. But then, as you go up the street, just a couple of hundred yards if that, it turns industrial. There’s four thousand people working in the Times building – well, when they are working – manufacturing the newspapers, and sending out the finished product in lorries. For that matter, you’ve got thousands of posties working just to the east in the Mount Pleasant sorting office, so there’s a definite blue-collar critical mass. And then, when you go on up the Gray’s Inn Road, again only a few hundred yards, it sinks into the scuzziness of King’s Cross. Winos, tarts and petty crims, all being steadily ignored by the commuters streaming on and off the trains. And that’s one street, half a mile long. It’s like some sort of chart of society, from poshness to the lower depths by way of the factory. But the parts do mix. None of it is all just the one thing. It’s the balance that shifts as you travel along it.
And here Alec is at the posh end, where the wigs predominate, and even a strike committee meets in a slightly college-quadrangle kind of atmosphere. The Furniture Trades Hall is one of those Edwardian edifices, like some old town halls or public libraries, that wanted to do grandeur for the people. Its actual hall is like a cut-down labour-movement version of the grand halls next door. Dark wood panels and scruffy plywood chairs.
He is a little bit late. The others on the joint liaison committee are already there, and Terry Fitzneil is tapping his biro on his agenda. He loves an agenda, does Terry. The Times dispute is five months old, and though it has quickened lately there is no sign of it coming to an end. But Terry’s enthusiasm is undimmed. He seems to be immune to boredom. It’s impressive, in a way, like being one of those people you hear of sometimes who can’t feel pain. The other fathers-of-chapel from the five unions representing the Times and Sunday Times staff have got that crumpled look, preset for endurance; they sit slightly slumped, ready for the long haul, even though the meeting’s just started. As old Clive Burnham said to Alec, before he emigrated to Australia, ‘You know what you need most, for a successful negotiation? An iron arse, that’s what.’ Terry, on the other hand, seems as happy as a hamster on a wheel, eyes bright, moustache quivering. His secret weapon for defending his NATSOPA clericals – the typists, the secretaries, the ladies who take down the classified ads – is a limitless willingness to talk. In any sentence of any draft agreement he can find an ambiguity that requires exploration. Slow exploration. Long exploration. Patient exploration. It’s a principle he brings to the job of handling the fraternal relations between unions, too.
‘Lot to get through this morning, gents,’ Terry says. ‘Update on the picketing arrangements; some nice messages of support I’m gonna share with you; news on the situation with the scab edition in Germany; provisional report on the co-op ownership plan, I’m hoping? Where are we with that, Josh?’
‘Coming along, Mr Fitzneil.’ Delicate point of class etiquette, just there. Josh Eden is there from the Times journalists’ chapel, a middle-class socialist playing nicely with the rough boys. He gets called Josh, just like the others round the table are Terry, Alec, Pat, George, Ian to each other. But he doesn’t get to call them by their first names in return. That would be a liberty. The dignity of being given the mister by those who work on the fifth floor is too important, even if this particular member of the boss-class happens to be an ally. Half-included, Josh goes on: ‘But I think maybe we should talk about the NUJ exec’s meeting last night first? There’s been a development.’
‘Well, I was going to get to that under Item 3. Is it urgent?’
‘I think so, yes.’
‘All right, then. I’ll just make a note. Hold on.’
They wait while Terry’s biro moves carefully. Someone lights a fag from the stub of an old one.
‘Yes,’ says Terry. ‘The floor is yours, Josh.’
‘Right. Thank you, Chair—’
‘Chair?’ says Pat derisively. ‘He’s not a piece of fookin’ furniture, you know.’
‘Steady on,’ says Alec. ‘Can’t speak disrespectfully of furniture, you know: not in here.’
‘I’m just trying to avoid, er, sexism,’ says Josh.
‘I wouldn’t say no to a bit of sex, cold morning like this,’ says an elderly lithographer from SLADE who has somehow become the group’s licensed blue joker, probably because his voice is satisfyingly prim.
‘Still up for it, then, your missus, is she?’ says Pat.
‘I’m glad to say that Mrs Edwards remains the tigress she has always been.’
Whistles and hoots for politeness’s sake, fairly nominal.
‘Sex-ism,’ says Terry reprovingly. He nods to Josh and they subside.
‘Right,’ says Josh. ‘Well, okay. Well, as I was saying, our NEC met last night, and the German edition was discussed; and I’m glad to say the ruling is that Times writers should not co-operate with the whole scheme.’
‘No co-operation meaning no copy?’ asks Alec. The journalists’ position in the dispute is tricky, because their chapels did reach a new working agreement with Times Newspapers Limited, last autumn, and so they didn’t get laid off when the lockout came. They’re still working, technically, though there isn’t anything for them to write, or hasn’t been till this idea of getting a kind of export-only Times printed up in Frankfurt came along. Apart from management, the journos are the only ones still occasionally going in and out of the building.
‘Yes,’ says Josh, and a chorus of approval goes round the table. ‘But, sorry, there’s a catch,’ he continues, raising his voice to be heard. ‘The national executive say no, but I couldn’t quite swing it at our own chapel vote. I’m afraid it was a close thing, but the Times NUJ has voted to co-operate. Some of us will write for the German version of the paper. You know, people are frustrated? With the general election coming up and everything? They want to get their pennyworth in. I’m sorry, I know it’s awkward.’
‘That’s one word for it,’ says Pat.
‘So, wait a minute, what’s that going to mean on the picket?’ says Alec, leaning forward. The picket concerns him more than it does any of the others, because it’s the compositors who took the initiative when the German thing leaked, and it’s the compositors and only the compositors who are keeping up the picket on all seven of the building’s entrances. ‘If they cross the line, are they scabbing or not?’
‘Not technically,’ says Josh. ‘Our constitution says the chapel has the final word, where there’s this kind of disagreement.’
‘Maybe that’s something that should be looked into, at a suitable moment,’ Terry says thoughtfully. ‘Convene a working group, maybe?’
‘We’re not the only ones who think local autonomy matters,’ says Josh, with a flash of defiance. The NATSOPA chapels are notoriously unruly, and have been ignoring their national leadership at will throughout the dispute.
‘Leaving that on one side,’ Alec insists, ‘what are we supposed to be saying to people today? What do my members say to your members, if they try to go in?’
‘It was very close, Mr Torrance,’ says Josh to Alec. ‘Very close; and I think a lot of the people who voted in favour are uncomfortable with it, deep down. So I think if you do get people coming in, this afternoon, you could probably get a long way with just, um, a gentle appeal?’
Pat snorts, but Alec nods. A mighty social gulf separates the journalists from the troglodyte world of the printing plant in the basement; but they work with the compositors directly, often, or at least through the wafer-thin mediation of the subs. He knows most of the Times’s London writers, to look at if not necessarily to talk to. He’s been typesetting their words for the last fifteen years. It’s a kind of intimacy; it’s something you can appeal to.
‘Gentle appeals it is,’ he says.
Five hours later, and Alec is standing in one of the smallest doorways of the Times building, wearing an NGA armband. He’s done his stint at the front door, where the picket is at its most visible and organised, and where there’s the greatest chance of an argumentative encounter. In fact, bar the odd bit of chanting to do when Marmaduke Hussey came back from his lunch, and leafletting passers-by, it’s been without drama. If Times journalists are at work today, they’re doing it at home. Now Alec has taken over the unpopular job of watching a side exit, and to be honest he rather welcomed the chance to be bored in solitary peace, instead of in company. He propped himself against the crinkled brown mosaic-tile wall of the passageway, sunk his chin onto his chest, and disappeared into Mario Puzo.
Tried, anyway. But there’s something insistently, distractingly woeful about the state of the building. He keeps glancing through the locked metal door at the stub of narrow corridor behind it, and the dim stairwell at the end, as if someone might come down. But of course they never do. The building is virtually empty, and rendered odd by its emptiness. It was never attractive, never somewhere with much of an atmosphere. The old Times site by St Paul’s was the place for that, the place where you could feel the history, and know that the brickwork had centuries’ worth of ink ground into it, all the way back to the dawn of the print, to hand presses and hand-setting. New Printing House Square, the present building is called, to try and claim some continuity, but it’s a dull and plain object, with fake arches of the mosaic cladding at the top of all the windows, and the only thing showing it’s not just an office block being the huge shuttered doors closing off the ramp from the basement. And it ain’t square either. It’s the shape of a sans-serif capital D, with a patch of corporate garden between the two prongs on the left.
The only thing it had going for it was energy. When the building was full, it buzzed like a hive. A quarrelsome hive, prone to blockage and disruption, admittedly: but even when in a state of frustration or bad temper, somewhere that pulsed with anxious urgency, all day long, accelerating and accelerating as the evening drew towards press time: when, after Pat’s NATSOPA boys had extracted their pound of flesh or Terry had forced a clarification of the word ‘secretary’ from some luckless editor, the presses would roll, and the roar and vibration of the great rotating drums would travel upstairs through the whole building, as a shake in the floors, a chattering of pencils left on desks, a standing wave in a cold, half-drunk mug of tea. And then, when Alec came out onto the pavement on his way to the bus stop, in winter dark or lingering blue high-summer light, his part of the process done, the first lorries would just be grinding up the ramp, stacked with bales of newsprint bound for the railway stations, so that tomorrow over breakfast in Greenock and Merioneth people could read Bernard Levin’s thoughts on Aida, or editorials by William Rees-Mogg containing words like ‘orotund’ and ‘oriflamme’. O-r-i-f-l-a-m-m-e.
Now, instead, the building is a derelict, a hulk. You could see it most clearly back before the days lengthened, when at teatime only a pathetic few strip lights would flicker on, up in the management’s rooms on the sixth floor, and the rest of the building dimmed to black. Blackness behind the hundreds of metal-framed windows, concentrating in there while outside it was still grey urban dusk. In the April light, the dereliction is less blatant, but it’s still palpable, and miserable. This is a hive without bees he’s guarding; a modern ruin; a structure unknitting itself. Entropy has crept through offices and composing rooms. Dust is gathering. There’s a polystyrene cup lying on its side at the bottom of the steps that must have been there for weeks. Energy is dying into dullness.
Alec is genuinely uncertain whether it’s ever going to come back to life. Management seem utterly cack-handed in their willingness to pick a fight they don’t know how to win. On the union side, the unity they can just about maintain in a talking shop like Terry’s committee falters into bickering as soon as there’s something definite on the table. The whole reason that there’s union leverage on Fleet Street is that the product is perishable – that if the Times doesn’t make it to the newsagents within a window of a few hours, it becomes unsaleable. But where does that power to take the print run hostage go when the paper is closed down by management? What can the compositors and the lithographers and the ad girls and the machine room operators threaten now?
And beyond all that, there’s the issue specific to his own union, the technological threat that affects the compositors alone. In any conceivable future, the paper is still going to need printing; there’ll still have to be people to operate the presses. (Though, yeah, probably not the five-hundred-odd that Pat claims pay packets for, half with names like M. MOUSE and D. DUCK written on them, thinks Alec, his compositor’s lip curling at the dirty ways of NATSOPA.) But upstairs somewhere, management has already bought and installed a computerised system for photo-composition. There are keyboards up there from which you can set whole pages of type, not single lines, without the need for burbling reservoirs of lead, or noisy Victorian clockwork. The NGA position is that they’re happy to move on from hot lead to quiet, hygienic screens, so long as it’s union compositors who sit at those screens, tapping away. But management has noticed – how could they not? – that this essentially means the pointless retyping of what the journos have typed in the first place. You could put the journos at the keyboards, and give them ‘direct input’, and at a stroke (at a keystroke, ha ha) you’d abolish the compositor. You’d abolish the whole skill that has meant a good living for working men for eighty years. You’d abolish Alec’s grandfather, and father. You’d abolish Alec. This is what a management victory threatens. This is what they keep pushing for: not the whole thing at once, they know they won’t get that, but little holes to puncture the dam, thin ends to a very fat wedge. Won’t you let us … have the phone girls input the ads directly, just the ads? Won’t you agree … to let the NGA supervise a single journalist keyboarding – just as an experiment? So far all these little probes for weakness have been fended off. Les Dixon, the NGA president, comes faithfully down to Gray’s Inn Road once a week to report, and he makes it sound as if it’s perfectly possible to hold the line; as if the sergeant majors of the union have safely got the measure of the officers up on the top floor. (Back in the war, he really was RSM Dixon in the Royal Military Police while Marmaduke Hussey was being Captain Hussey of the Grenadier Guards.) Maybe, thinks Alec. Maybe. It’s true that the Guardian and the Mirror have signed up for photo-composition by the union. But alone with the loud melancholy of the building, surrounded by a million grimy brown tiles, it’s hard to avoid a melancholy of his own. In this blocked-off inlet of a dead building, the thought is horribly near that his own life in the print, these last twenty years, may also have been a blind alley.
Oh, come on, he thinks, snap out of it. Whatever happens, he reminds himself, it has been a good life. He’s been able to feed and clothe and house Sandra and the boys. He’s been able to pay for school trips, nights at the pictures, a colour telly, a car. Holidays, too: though when they went to Spain, there was noisy boredom from the boys when he tried to get them to look at old churches. Stevie adores Gary, that’s the trouble; always has, from when he was a toddler. If big brother does it, he does it too. Oh well, that’s a melancholy sidetrack of its own. Alec liked it better last year, when the boys were left to look after themselves for a weekend, in a litter of fish-and-chip paper, and he and Sandra went bed-and-breakfasting in Kent, on their own. It was about this time of year, come to think of it. They went walking round a gravel pit, just the two of them, on a green-and-white day when mist up above matched the blossom on the thorn bushes. Both ways round: as if it was shreds of mist that had caught in the bushes, and as if the pale sky was about to burst out into flowers. A green-and-white world, and him and Sandra hand in hand in it.
Oh, come on, you great softy, he thinks. Thrusts the neglected copy of The Godfather into his anorak, pokes his head out of the doorway. Nothing happening. He’ll just nip along to the main picket, check everything’s hunky-dory.
‘All right, lads?’ he’s just saying as he approaches, when a boy with sideburns whose name he can’t remember, not long out of the apprenticeship and fresh-moved to the Times when the lockout began, points at something over Alec’s shoulder.
‘Ey-ey-ey!’ he cries.
Alec turns and a figure is indeed bowling across the road towards the emptied doorway, loose-limbed and slightly approximate but moving with intent.
‘Shall we come over with you, bit of moral support?’ says the boy.
‘No, no,’ calls Alec as he sprints back, ‘I know him. More chance if it’s just one.’
He is just in time to block the entry as Hugo Cornford of the political desk reaches it. He’s in his early forties, but burly in that upper-crust way you get when the effects of public-school rugby linger lifelong. He has brogues and corduroy trousers on, and one of those non-functional scarves wrapped round his neck, like an enormous woolly cravat. And judging by his high colour and slightly random movements, he is indeed a journalist who has lunched.
‘Buggeration,’ he says. ‘I thought there wouldn’t be anyone in these little doors. Hello, Alec.’
‘Hello, Hugo. Sorry, the picket’s here too. Anyway, ’s locked.’
‘I,’ says Hugo, his voice booming in his chest like an echo trying to get out of a cave, ‘happen to have a key, actually. And I’m coming in. As the bishop said to the actress.’
‘Well, I won’t stop you—’ begins Alec.
‘Can’t stop me, actually, legally, I think?’
‘—but I am going to ask you to think about it for a sec.’
‘Oh-kay. Thinking about it, thinking about it, thought about it now; still coming in.’
Cornford is much less of a bullshitter when he is sober, Alec reminds himself. He’s a foreign correspondent turned parliamentary sketch writer, and Alec has been reading his work for more than a decade now. (Some compositors, maybe most, let the copy flow through their minds untouched by conscious attention, like a stream of Morse code. But not Alec.) Terse, atmospheric, anger-breeding reports from Vietnam; more recently, acidic comedy from the House of Commons, as the Labour government lurches from emergency to emergency. He’s good. His sentences are a pleasure to set. He is – at least he used to be – one of those posh Trotskyists, with their own mysterious little world from which they emerge to be a good sport, old bean, on protest marches.
‘I suppose you’re here to write up something for the German edition,’ says Alec. ‘Am I right?’
‘For the forlorn rag which is all that remains of a great paper, yes. And why shouldn’t I?’
‘Well, because this is a picket line, and you’re a socialist.’
‘Am I?’ says Cornford, rubbing at his face. ‘I don’t know what that word even means any more.’
Not very promising.
‘Cigarette?’ says Alec, offering his packet.
‘No, no, I should get on,’ Cornford says, and he starts fumbling in his corduroys for a key.
‘All right, then, because,’ says Alec, ‘the German print run probably won’t even happen?’
‘Is that right.’ Jingle, jingle.
‘Yes. I don’t know if you know, but we’ve got the German print unions looking for the outfit that’s doing it, and when they find it—’
‘They’ll try to shut it down, I suppose? Oh, charming. Very constructive.’
‘When they find it,’ says Alec, getting crosser himself, ‘they’ll let them know that it’s a sleazy ploy to get around a legitimate dispute back in England, and then it’ll be up to them whether they want to piss off IG Papier and be blacklisted forever after.’
‘I see. How dignified. How righteous. So?’ He’s found his key.
Alec looks at Cornford. It’s as if some piece of awkward but previously negotiable understanding has vanished, or been withdrawn, and in its place has appeared, or reappeared, something … harder.
‘So,’ Alec persists, ‘for the sake of something that probably won’t even happen, you’ll be risking your’ – what’s the best word – ‘relationships with all the people you work with.’
‘Work with?’ says Cornford, and now he looks hard at Alec, and seems bull-like, threatening almost. ‘I don’t “work with” you. I get messed around by you; I get held up by you.’
‘Me?’ says Alec, holding the look.
‘No, not you personally. I mean you chaps in general; all of you chaps. This last couple of years, we don’t even know if you’re going to deign to let us bring the paper out. It’s touch and go every bloody night.’
‘That’s not us, that’s NATSOPA.’
‘Who cares which of you it is? NATSOPA and the NGA, SLADE and SOGAT: I’m sick of the lot of you.’
‘Well, this last couple of years,’ says Alec, ‘we’ve turned into the worst-paid workforce in Fleet Street. Did you know that? Management have stuck to the government’s bloody incomes policy, and we’re the ones who’ve paid the price for it. Maybe that’s why things have got a bit bad-tempered, did you ever think?’
‘Don’t care; sorry, don’t care. I just want to be able to write my stuff, and know it’ll be printed. Now can you move out of the way, please?’
I just want to write my stuff. Alec is suddenly able to draw the obvious conclusion from Cornford’s agitation, his sense of urgency, and flings it out as a last gambit.
‘You’ve got a story, haven’t you?’ he says. Deliberately, he grins.
‘Yes!’ says Cornford.
‘And you’re dying to get it down, aren’t you? You want to tell the world, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ says Cornford. ‘Come on, Alec, move over.’
‘Well, if you go in there, it won’t get printed, will it. Why not tell it to me?’
Cornford laughs, then he stops.
‘Seriously?’ he says.
‘Yes. Go on.’
‘No offence, but you’re not exactly the audience I had in mind. You’re more the subject matter.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean that I’ve just been to a lunch at the House of Commons, and the times they are about to change.’
‘We can deal with the Tories,’ says Alec. ‘We saw them off last time.’
‘This is going to be different. They’re not the half-hearted patricians you’re used to; not any more. And then – and then – I’m afraid you chaps are going to get blown away like dandelion fluff. Gangway!’
Cornford pushes past in a spiritous vapour, jiggles open the door, shuts it behind him, and is gone up the stairs. A storey up, he must click a light switch: a small, bleak patch of fluorescence flickers into existence on the steps at the end of the dead stub of corridor.
Jo has a little house on the heights. Really, the summerhouse of the grander glass-walled place next door, but separated from it during some kind of marital dispute of the landlord’s, and now rented out on its own, with its own little crease in the hillside filled with the deep green shade of pines and succulents, bamboo and yucca: the California green that can make you forget the California brown all around it. The deck is upstairs, on a level with the tops of the branches, and looks west through a notch in the skyline towards the bruise-coloured inversion layer and the mica glitter of LA on the plain below. When she breakfasts out there, it isn’t usually morning. Times they are recording, like now, make her almost nocturnal, and once she’s got rid of any company – less and less of a necessity these days – and comes blearily outside with a cup of black coffee and a sliced peach taken cold from the fridge, it’s around five in the afternoon. The sun is sinking westwards, swollen and bloody, and she sits in a puddle of crimson light, her eyes itching behind her shades. But then the track of the sun takes it behind the canyon wall. The last lip of its disc blazes into a bright line and disappears, and all of a sudden she finds herself in a space of gentle air, long-shadowed, blood-warm. The cicadas are tuning up their instruments, the smog above the city is dimming to pearlescent prettiness, the lights below are just beginning to twinkle out their come-on that never tires. She’s tired, though. She pours a second cup of coffee and in the couple of hours that are hers before she is due at that night’s restaurant rendezvous, she makes herself fetch out the four-track in the twilight and, with no one to hear, tries to work out a little music on her own account.
Guitar first. This is a song she’s trying to come at from both ends. She has a few of the words, and an inkling of the tune, but not the whole of either. What she knows is the colours it should be. It should be grey, silver and brown; the brown, that is, of old wood, or old brick walls, not the warm living brown of skin, which needs a different music altogether. Cold-weather colours that are nowhere on the Californian palette, even in this tender evening glow. So, maybe A minor? And acoustic, of course. She settles the Ovation on her knee, and picks out a basic little pattern in four-four time. Plucks it, rather, with her nails, to give it a melancholy sharpness, an almost tinkling plaintive edge in the sound. Steady, though: she doesn’t want to pick the steel strings too hard and turn the sound too country. Hmm.
Round and round she goes, and her intuitions of tune begin to take some more shape and to declare themselves. Something is forming: a structure for the verses (three lines: two short, one double-long) that goes Dee-dee dee DEE, Dee-dee dee DEE-ee, Dee dee-dee dee dee DEE dee dee dee-dee DEE-ee. And a chorus, higher, which for three little sets of call and response will make a wistful, tentative, suspended kind of sound, at least the first time she sings through it, but which can then fill out with a stronger push of mournful feeling on the next visit, before soaring out (both times) into a line that will use her full voice. Dee-dee-dee, DEE-dee; Dee-dee-dee, Dee-dee; Dee-dee-dee, DEE DEE; Dee dee dee dee dee-dee DEE DEE DEE. Like that, or nearly like that. Something’s there, and it has the colouring she wants, grey silver brown, which for her are memory-colours, the shades for things remembered rather than physically present. Is it hers, though? In this groping early stage it’s hard to tell apart a melody you’re discovering from one you’re half-remembering. She thinks so, but tucks a little mental reservation into place so she isn’t wholly surprised or disheartened if she remembers a source for it in another song, later.
Right. Catch it, while the catching is good. (The shadows have lengthened out into a sheet of shade, abolishing the gold etching round the edges of the leaves, and the sky is going to dark violet, and the lights of the city on the plain are sparkling brighter in proportion.) Plug in the pick-up. Stretch the leader from a new spool of decent BASF tape through the heads and onto the take-up reel. Fast-forward a little way. Flip flip flipflipflipflip. Zero the timer. Turn on track one and check the needle moves with a chord or two. Check tracks two, three and four are safely off. Cue up the combination of buttons for Record, with Pause engaged as the trigger. Breathe. And … Pause off. The sweet-tipped melancholy jangle of A minor floats over the darkened paddles of the cactuses and the resinous asterisks along the pine branches. With the part of her mind that isn’t concentrating on picking as precisely as possible, she notices how inevitable the tune is already sounding: how meant, how deliberate, this thing that she has been pulling together from who knows what vapour, who knows how. It’s necessary, this hardening of the separate parts of a song. Without it, as you turned to a new task, the rest would melt back into the mush of possibility again. And if you need to alter what has already hardened, there is scope to return and soften it again, for a while. She does so now: as she plays back the guitar track, and is provisionally pleased with it, a thought occurs to her, and she goes back and re-records the same thing on track one, only now with a bit of reverb on. Yes, that’s right. Though the physical space she’s working in is the room behind an open deck, with the French doors open, her pointillist sad steelwork now sounds as if it’s happening somewhere bigger and emptier, echoing back just a little from the surfaces of distant objects. From the remembered things, the absent things, the song will name, perhaps. This is how the feel builds, laid physically into the acoustics, integrating sound and idea.
If this were proper studio work, not homebrew improvisation, she’d go on to figure out a bassline, a piano line, maybe, on one of an electric piano’s lonelier-sounding settings. But with just her and a four-track, the guitar is the only instrument she has space for. She wants the other three tracks for voice. That’s where there’s most to work out, that’s where the heavy lifting of mood needs to go; and she has in mind – half in mind, half-loose and indefinite and out of reach until she has the actual sounds before her and can wind them to actuality – a delicate thing where on two of the tracks she harmonises with herself on a time delay, so that echo between two versions of her duetting in time creates, in another reinforcing way, the empty space, the longing absence of the song. Leaving the last track for her as her own backing singer. A chorus of Jos: two at the front facing each other, and another behind doo-wopping, oo-woo-ing, yay-yay-ing. And all on her terms.
The land is black now, though, and the sky behind is a deep indigo, gauzy, cinematic, looking as if it’s waiting shamelessly for searchlights and kettledrums. (That’s the trouble with living in the Hollywood Hills. Reality tends constantly towards movie cliché, particularly once nightfall has smoothed away the daytime scurf of Los Angeles, refining all those one-storey breeze-block bodegas and bail bond offices into vistas of tail-lights and skyglow.) She looks at her watch. No time to do it all. But time to begin. If she hurries. If she can manage to keep hurry out of her voice.
Track two. Plug in the mike. Fetch out the pad that’s got her criss-crossed first thoughts about the lyrics on it. She can hardly see it in the small leaks of light from the meters of the four-track, but it’s important to have the piece of paper there, somehow, even if she’s working mostly from memory. It’s another solidification, another little handle on something still only half-formed. Sing a little against the guitar track with Record off to play with the levels. That’ll do. Remember to press the Simul-Sync button, so the playback she’s singing against isn’t a randomising twelfth of a second out of sync with the voice – not a delicate game with time, that, but a toe-stubbing trip over time’s doorstep, when you get it wrong. Breathe. Breathe. Try to banish the anxieties of the night, and find grey, silver, brown: the sound of missing what is missing, of feeling the distance of all you name, as you name it. For some reason it is getting hotter again, as if the withdrawal of the light has stilled the air currents on the hillside. The LA night presses. Pause off, and Jo raises a voice, a small voice, an unhopeful voice, and sends it winding out into the hot dark.
A love unknown
A seed not sown
May grow someday into a flowering tree
Next time’s the charm
No fire alarm
To smash the spell uniting you and me
Then the chorus, with the momentum that’s gathered so far dialled back into high, wistful to-and-fro. Almost throaty, almost raspy, the feeling near the surface; and as she works on that, pushing deep down away from the surface, as far into irrelevant oblivion as she can manage, where it can’t mess things up, the distracting thought that she might (of all things) have stolen part of the tune from Ray Charles singing ‘Makin’ Whoopee’. No, no, no. Shut up, mind, and sing.
Hanging on
next time
Depending on
next time
And all because
this time
And then some muscle into the voice: not too much, a marker for how strong this line’s going to be when the chorus comes round again, and she’s shifted into full-throated angry-woman lament. But some. A change of gear. A filling-out. A gain of force. And naturally a platform for the clever things her second self will be singing against her, here.
… you left me singing solo harmonies
Leave a gap, a longer gap than seems natural, to accommodate whatever layering will go in there on the other tracks. If it’s too long she can always trim it in the edit. And round again into the verses, but now with power continuing in the voice at a level only a little lower than the last line of the chorus. Push, Jo. Let the diva out. Push rage and heartbreak into the night. Make the silver and the grey, ring; let the brown resound.
Pouring rain
As you explain
We’re better off divided, you and me
A moment’s hush
And then the rush
Of this time crumbling into history
Something into history, anyway. Crashing? Folding? Drifting? Fading? This time the thought snags her too insistently, and just like that pulls her out of the necessary mood. The song crashes, folds, crumbles, drifts, fades. And into its place the anxiety she’s been holding at bay comes irresistibly. Shit. Press Pause. Her watch says she’s out of time anyway. Rewind; label the tape NEXT TIME #1 and put it away in the row of others, that little library of ideas for which (it seems to her when she’s down) she’s always running out of time, or missing the moment, or finding her enthusiasms have moved on from. She will finish this one, she swears. And she has also sworn, she reminds herself, that she will make herself make Ricky listen to something here, while he’s in reach. Her fingers dance nervously along the shelf. NEXT TIME isn’t ready. He’s never, never hearing LOST SOUL. She picks out NOBODY’S FAULT, four-fifths of a piece of cheerful funk about earthquakes.
And after a quick shower, and a brief confrontation with her face in the bathroom mirror as she dolls herself up, she’s away, heading down-canyon in the Beetle with the windows wound open all the way. When the night air goes sluggish and stifling here, you can either hide indoors in the aircon, or move through it, making your own breeze. That must be some of the reason why the freeways are busy almost till midnight, these August nights, and at the stoplights on the boulevards there’s always a revving, impatient queue. It’s not that people have anywhere to get to, they just can’t stand staying still. Hot gusts, sage-smelling, blow on her as she corners and corners and corners again on the bends of the canyon road, washing-machine whirr sounding from the engine compartment, headlights skipping and sidling across trashcans, mailboxes, adobe walls, pine roots, the crazy-paved barrier at the edge of the drop and, nearly at the bottom, the carcass of a piano someone dragged outside to be nested in by jays. It’s a kind of boundary stone, that piano. It seems to have been there, bleaching, for a decade, since the canyon’s hippy glory days. It declared the beginning of the freaks’ kingdom, to those going up. The end of it, going down. Beyond, the road straightens and the grade eases, and after only another minute she’s crossing Sunset and has joined the red/white flow of the automotive pilgrimage to nowhere. The light streams carry her. The tropical neon swallows her.
The restaurant is in Beverly Hills. Now and again, Ricky will conceive a fancy for really obscure ethnic food, or for some Mexican place that’s been written up for its challenging authenticity, and they’ll all obediently troop off to Long Beach or Culver City. But for the most part he has a taste for unironic, dependable luxury. He likes cocktails, and steak, and valet parking, and beautiful waitstaff, and maître d’s who know who you are and who seat you where you get the right combination of privacy and admiration. So Jo pulls up a manicured drive between uplighters styled to look like Japanese stone lanterns, and has the VW sneered at by a boy who looks like a dilute version of the young Tony Curtis. And then is hastily grovelled to, once it becomes clear that she is somehow part of the entourage. She finds them all in a private (or ‘private’) room beyond the pool, a long low teak cabana blue-lit by reflections from the water, and safely out of earshot of the other diners but so latticed and louvred that rock-star still lifes in various poses are sure to be on view.
She’s the last to arrive, or nearly the last. The table is already cluttered with glassware and food, and Ricky is seated halfway up, Last Supper-style, flanked by a gaggle of people on his left and a gaggle on his right, all leaning slightly in towards him and paying attention, even as they rabbit on to each other about other things. She doesn’t know any of them very well, though they’re now into their second week of working together. There’s Si, Ricky’s new manager, and Si’s plus-one, a blonde girl trying hard to fall out of a halter top. There’s Johnson, a gruff bassist from Watts whom she rather rates. (He has been responding to Ricky’s attempts to soul up the mix with silently rising eyebrows.) There’s Rubén, the producer provided by the label; there’s Ricky’s own favoured producer Ed, present to keep things territorially complicated. There’s Ricky’s PA, Melissa, a size-6 New Yorker. There’s the engineer from Aurora Studios, invited along every night since the second one, on Ricky’s principle that you should always butter up the sound guy, and his assistant, a crop-haired lesbian with an opiate pallor who is well worth listening to when she isn’t locked in the toilet. Further out, there’s the nightly altering crew of session musicians, in whose number Jo technically belongs, except she doesn’t. Closest in – in fact stuck to Ricky’s right side like five foot ten of bronze draught excluder – is his current girlfriend, twenty-two-year-old Angeline from Buenos Aires, delivering another instalment of her surely exhausting one-woman show Continuous Minx. She shrugs, she pouts, she rolls her eyes. She dibbles in his shirt front with her almond-shaped scarlet nails. The man himself is tapping his fag ash into a half-drunk flute of Dom Pérignon and twiddling his expensively spiked platinum hair.
‘Wotcher, Frogface,’ she says.
‘’Ello, J!’ he says, looking up. His voice after seven years in America has morphed into a kind of generic expat cockney. It would be easier to deal with him if she could concentrate on how ridiculous that is, and not notice that his face still lights up with reliable pleasure when he sees her.
‘What is this, this “frog”?’ enquires Angeline, scowling.
‘’S just an old joke, sweetheart,’ says Ricky. To Jo: ‘All right, then? Thought you’d stood us up.’
‘Just trying to finish something.’
‘Right, right,’ says Ricky. He doesn’t ask what; he never has. ‘Gotta have you here, though, babes. Can’t do without you, you know that.’
What is it in her he can’t do without: that’s the question. What she does for him, what she means to him. All that seemed obvious, once. During the golden year that Racket broke America for him and they toured month after month across the continent, the music was something they were doing together. She was with him constantly, on the stage and off, sharing a bed in every hotel from Nashville to Seattle, a bed which was their bed not his bed. In Atlanta they went to a black church together on Sunday morning to drink gospel from the source. In a lodge among redwood trees in Oregon they played with a mandolin all through a mid-summer night, till dawn came through the calm red columns in green beams. In the Wichita Hilton he tickled her so unmercifully that she actually wet herself. That year she was … something unnamed. But something more substantial than a rock star’s girlfriend. Collaborator, musical best friend, sounding board, sharer in the ridiculous adventure of his fame: from San Diego to Boston, almost as inevitable and central a member of the band as him. Only not on paper, and not with any songwriting credits, which turned out to mean that it was easy for her to fall all the way out of the band when she got pregnant (Bangor, Maine, a blizzard day) and he panicked, and needed her to make the threat of permanence go away, and then suddenly couldn’t bear to have her around.
But he couldn’t bear to let her go completely either. She had her viable small-scale West Coast life, never near the headliners again yet never short of work, and on he went into full-blown celebrity, adding glam-rock sequins to his original white-boy blues. But when he had a record to make, and sometimes when he didn’t, when he was just in town, he’d leave a message on her answering machine, chirpy and wistful; and then she’d find herself in a studio with him, or in a bed, and for a little while they would inhabit a painful echo of the past that neither of them seemed quite able to refuse. It wasn’t just nostalgia. It would have been easier to resist if so. Reduced, ragged, something still reliably awoke between them. Unfinished business with a long half-life, getting fainter on a slow clock.
Last week, when they’d been working on a raspy crowd-pleaser that she found almost completely synthetic, a piece of plastic soul worked up to make housewives throw knickers at him, he’d caught the scepticism on her face.
‘Don’tcha like it?’ he said.
‘I dunno. It’s a bit … leopard-skin trousers, isn’t it?’
‘Oi! What’s wrong with leopard-skin trousers?’ – grinning, joking, but with a touch of real anxiety in there, too. Her judgement still affected him. He still wanted her approval. He wouldn’t do anything at her say-so that he wasn’t already planning to do; but he wanted to be reassured about it. It was like being, in this one narrow respect, his wife, with the power to make him feel okay, or not.
Tonight follows a familiar pattern. Food and drink and bullshitting and a line or two, and a swim in the electric blue of the restaurant pool with much look-at-me splashing from Angeline, and a blowjob-length disappearance by her and Ricky, while Si flirts awkwardly with Jo. He has picked up that she is important to Ricky but cannot work out how, exactly. She is not inclined to help him out. Sometime towards 1 a.m., they make the move over to Aurora, Ricky trying to urge her to ride in the stretch limo, she insisting on puttering along behind in the VW. (Jo’s principle: never be without your own means of departure.) Another burst of high-jinks before they settle, the transition being marked by the ceremonial playback of last night’s completed track, the disco-fied number that put Johnson into the state of silent irony. Then, finally, they can get to tonight’s work, a relatively simple ballad-ish thing which, thank God, has the potential to be genuinely touching if done right. It’s not by Ricky; it’s a cover version, but one chosen quite cunningly to suit his voice. He’s always been able to survey his own talent with a detached eye. It’s one of the things she finds admirable about him. He puts on the cans, shuts his eyes and becomes serious. She falls into her own familiar groove when working with him, in and out of the picture as required of her as a backing singer, but otherwise without comment becoming part of the little group around the engineer in the control room. When she makes a suggestion to Ricky through his phones, when she stops him and tells him his phrasing’s off, he nods contentedly.
By half four they’ve essentially got the track. Angeline is bored and yawning as they listen to the playback. They need a retake on part of Jo’s rising wail in the third verse, and she heads back through the soundproof doors.
‘Someone come and give me a note?’ she says, and she is surprised, but not totally surprised, when Ricky follows her through, and sits down at the piano, alone with her on the players’ side of the glass.
Pling-pling-pling, he goes, on the C above middle C. She finds it, she gives the thumbs-up to Ed, the engineer rolls tape, and she pulls up from her diaphragm, if she does say so herself, just the quiet banshee ripples which will resonate unobtrusively with Ricky’s voice. He listens, smiling. Beyond the glass Angeline scowls. She is not without basic radar, even if all her brain cells are devoted to controlling her hips, even if she has no idea why it should be the cranky, uncharming woman of nearly forty who is a rival here. Jo points.
‘You’re pissing someone off,’ she tells Ricky.
‘Yeah?’ says Ricky.
He makes eye contact with Angeline, poises his hands over the keyboard, and without warning starts pounding the ivories in full-on honky-tonk pub-piano mode.
She was a beauty queen-ah!
From down in Argentin-ah!
Angeline doesn’t know much, but she knows when she’s being mocked. She flounces out of sight.
‘Can you turn off, please, Ed?’ says Ricky into his mike. The green lights wink out.
‘That wasn’t very kind,’ says Jo.
‘Do you care?’ says Ricky.
‘Nope.’
‘Didn’t think so.’
‘I was wondering—’ she begins.
‘I was hoping—’ he says at the same time.
‘What?’ says Ricky.
‘No, you first.’
‘Well,’ Ricky says, looking down and playing soft chords, ‘I was hoping …’
She knows what he means. She knows what it will be like if she says yes, based on all the other times she’s said yes. Twenty-four tempestuous hours of expensive hotel, good sex (because they know their way round each other really well), more or less coke depending on the state of Ricky’s habits, and almost certainly some highly pleasurable messing about together on guitar and piano. He always gets a suite with a piano. ‘Hey, Liberace,’ she’ll say, and he’ll chase her around the bed. It’ll be fun. And it will end with protestations, and with him sending her home up the canyon in a limo she does accept. And they’ll have been pretending, both of them. It will have been a tiny visit to what might have been, which only works because they look away from the difficult stuff, and ask no questions, and part before the pretending becomes unbearable. And maybe she will do it anyway, because she misses it so. But now it will look as if what she wants to ask him is a quid pro quo, a favour in return for a favour.
‘What about …?’ she says, nodding towards the sound booth.
‘That’s not exactly serious.’
And what are we? she wants to say, but doesn’t. He sees her hesitation, and doesn’t press the point. He has his delicacies.
‘What were you gonna ask me, then?’
‘D’you ever miss London?’ she says, chickening out: but chickening out into a subject that really has been on her mind.
‘God, no,’ says Ricky, looking surprised. ‘I was there on tour in the spring, and it was grim, grim, grim. Dirty and miserable and kind of, you know, defeated-feeling?’
‘So far as you could tell from Claridge’s.’
‘So far as I could tell from the Dorchester, darling. Why?’
‘Oh, nothing much.’
‘You’re homesick, aren’cha,’ he says, with a sharp, diagnostic glance.
‘Well, maybe.’
‘I get that. I do! But not for London. You gotta remember, it was only somewhere I stayed for a bit, mostly in bloody bedsits. But Bristol – yes, I miss Bristol, moy lovurr.’ A quick trill on the high notes. ‘Not often, but sometimes. I’ll be in a hotel somewhere, doing my stuff, click-click, flash-flash, hello darling, and I’ll realise, shit, for hours and hours I’ve been walking through Filwood in the back of my head. Like a very slow slideshow, you know, going on behind everything else? And it gets you, doesn’t it, under here.’ He pokes himself under his ribs. ‘But you wait, and it goes away again. You just have to wait it out.’
‘You don’t ever want to go back for real?’
‘Can’t, can I? ’S not Filwood now I’m walking through, whatever that’s like; it’s Filwood then, and the postboxes are taller than my head, and I’m on my way home with a Lonnie Donegan single; and that’s the point. That’s all gone. Except in here.’ Tap-tap. ‘I wouldn’t find it if I got on a plane, would I?’
‘I suppose not.’
‘You can’t go home, babes. You can’t go back. You gotta go on. Think about it. What’s waiting for you, if you get on a plane?’ His voice has gone gentle. ‘Not your mum, love. Tea’s not waiting on the table.’
‘There’s my sister.’
‘The one who’s married to the actual Nazi.’
‘That’s the one.’
‘Tempting, highly tempting. You could go and help them sing “Deutschland, Deutschland” on the streets of Lewisham.’
‘Bexford.’
‘Same difference. No! Stay in the sunshine, love.’
He plays end-of-a-tune chords – dum, dum, du-dumm – which make it clear that he’s ready for the conversation to be over, and for him to get an answer to his question. And something about this, and about his obvious pleasure just now at being given a chance on easy terms to be wise and kind, tips a balance inside Jo, and makes it possible for her to say what she meant to in the first place.
‘Can I play you something?’
‘Like, of your own?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Course! Anytime, babes, anytime.’
‘I’ve got it here.’
‘Oh-kay … Right. Right! Let’s have it on.’
They go back through the soundproof doors, Ricky wearing a faint puzzled frown, and she fishes the reel of ‘Nobody’s Fault’ out of her bag.
‘Something of Jo’s we’re just going to run through,’ announces Ricky to Ed, Rubén, Opiate Dyke, Johnson, the other draggled survivors of the night. ‘Didn’t I always say, look out when Jo gets an album together? Didn’t I always say, she’s gonna do something great?’
They nod, but it’s polite, uncomprehending. None of these are the people they toured with in ’72 and ’73, who saw them in their glory days. Ricky has fallen out with all of those – with everybody, in fact, who knew the non-famous version of him. Except, possibly, her. This lot pick up a few old-girlfriend molecules in the air, and that’s it.
‘Rick?’ says Ed, yawning, before she can get the tape anywhere near the reel-to-reel. ‘Could we maybe do that later? We’ve really got to put this track to bed now?’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ says Ricky, clicking his tongue. ‘I suppose you’re right. Sorry, J. Duty calls. But – next time, yeah?’
Dawn finds her at the store halfway up the canyon. It’s just opened. Normally she pulls the Beetle over and nips inside only for long enough to pick up some milk, and some fruit from the trays in the shade out front: furred peaches, plums with the purple-white bloom still on them, watermelons striped like circus tents. But today for some reason she buys a cup of fresh coffee from the percolator and takes it outside to sit with it under the vine. All the time she’s lived here there’s been a mural on the front wall, a Joan Baez-like hippy-chick face, crowned with stars, growing paler and paler as the LA sun wears away the colours. Now the owners have had it repainted. Their glory days are what they plan to trade on forever. Joan’s eyes are piercing turquoise again, Joan’s hair is a smooth gloss-black waterfall. And above, the sky brightens to the implacable blue of yet another day without rain.
She misses rain.
Rain is general all over London, falling in a steady dismal downpour on the bridges, on the monuments, on the parks, on the rusting cranes in the docks, on the twenty thousand sullen streets; on the sodden green of Bexford Park and the grey towers of the Park Estate; on last night’s vomit, swilling away across the pavements to join the mush of fish-and-chip paper in the gutter; falling too, further out, on the golf courses of Swanley and the avenue named after a flower where Vern is being thrown out of the large detached house he bought before his second bankruptcy.
‘Don’t forget anything,’ says Kath, watching as he wrestles a cardboard box and a suitcase down the stairs. ‘I’m not sending it after you.’
‘Fuck it,’ says Vern, ‘this is an overnight bag and stuff for this week. Half of everything here is mine.’
‘It bloody isn’t, and watch your mouth in front of the girls, thank you very much.’
Sally and Becky, aged four and six, are hiding behind their mother’s legs.
‘Daddy will be back soon,’ says Vern to them, trying for a voice of reassurance: but he hasn’t ever had much to do with them, and they shrink away. Two stocky little girls and one stocky little woman, like peas in a pod. A female family, sufficient without him.
‘No, he won’t,’ says Kath. ‘Daddy is slinging his hook. Daddy! When were you ever that? We wouldn’t have a bloody roof over our heads if it wasn’t for me. You screwed up, I sorted it. So none of this is yours, not any more.’
It’s true that it was Kath, as the accountant for Albemarle Developments, who talked him into putting the house in her name, ‘just in case’, and it’s true that that’s what stopped the house getting treated as an asset, and washed away by the debts when Albemarle went tits-up. But he can remember other things being true. There’s no point in arguing, not now, but he can’t help himself.
‘You were just as much in favour of the shopping centre as me,’ he says.
‘Well, I didn’t think you’d make such a pig’s ear of it, did I.’
‘It was the bloody interest rates that did us in, you know that!’
‘We’d have coped with them if the income had kept up. But it didn’t, and whose fault was that? You picked the location. You picked the tenants. You skimped on the insurance. You!’
Vern, pinned by banisters, box, suitcase, feels a familiar wrath congesting him. Kath’s sharp little finger is up, poking at the air in front of her, and her face is stony with dislike. But there’s something else in it, a kind of satisfaction, a pleasure in being on the winning end, even in an argument about the wreck of their business; and looking at her, he wonders all of a sudden if her getting together with him in the first place ever had much more in it than this same determination to win. Kath in the back office of the estate agent’s where he met her, grinning at him. Kath in a wedding dress, triumphing over her sisters. Kath in bed, briskly riding on his bulk, impatient eyes fixed on him. Kath in the maternity hospital, presenting a bundled-up Becky like an on-time payment. Kath’s early, decisive pessimism as Albemarle ran into trouble, when he was still telling himself stories of how it could come right. Kath’s detachment, Kath’s self-protection, Kath’s stone face. She’s a bookie’s daughter. He should have realised she’d be good at telling when the odds change. Fuck it.
‘All right, then,’ he says. ‘I’m off.’
‘You need to give me the office key. Where is it?’
‘Dunno,’ he lies. And he uses a little bit of the rage that is thickening his neck, lets out just enough of it to bull his way past, pluck up a random umbrella, hook the front door open, and stomp off down the path in the wet.
Even the short walk to the Mini is enough to plaster his hair, and damp the corners of the cardboard box, in the cold pelt from above. It’s a world of liquid noises outside: pattering from the eaves, guggles from the red-brick path he never got round to weeding, a tireless pissing from the downpipe by the garage. A sheen of water is moving on the driveway. By the time he’s wrestled the case and the box into the narrow back seat and wedged himself behind the wheel, his face is so sopping he has to blot his eyebrows with his tie so he can see straight. The Mini feels tiny. It seemed cute once, a neat trademark for Albemarle that a big man in a blue suit should emerge from a little blue car. Albemarle: Big Things in Small Boxes! That’s what he had in mind to use as a slogan for the company’s next stage, when they built the second, third, fourth shopping centre. None of that is going to happen now. Now, the car seems like a tin skin wrapped too tight around his swollen, damp fury. Bastard thing. Bastard life. Bastard wife. Vern rocks and roars, and having nothing else to do with his fat fists in the small space, pounds on the steering wheel. Of course the horn sticks, sending a thin continuous parp of distress winding through suburban Swanley. Some bastard neighbour would poke their nose over the hedge to see what’s going on, if it wasn’t for the rain. He has to jiggle the steering column to make the button pop back up. Then he puts the Mini in gear and goes.
Traffic hissing on the roads north; the wheels of buses and lorries sloshing out arcs of spray; tail-lights squiggling and goggling through the rain. The wipers on the Mini can’t keep up with the rivulets running down the windscreen. He hunches forward and peers. But everything is going equally slow, and rain can’t stop him knowing the way to Bexford. He could probably drive it blindfold. It’s the A20 all the way: the Swanley bypass, and then the Sidcup bypass, and then the Eltham bypass, gentle curve after gentle curve of tarmacked no-place, with the green signs for the exits coming up in the gloom like unconvincing promises.
Somewhere around Sidcup he fumbles in the glove compartment and finds the cassette of Joan Sutherland singing Lucia di Lammermoor. He saw her do it once, nearly ten years ago, at the point when he’d picked himself up from the smash of Grosvenor and was just working out how to put Albemarle together. He hadn’t met Kath yet; that was coming when he started looking for agencies with small supermarkets in their client lists. And here’s the whole glorious flight of that voice, bottled, time-proofed, except that the cassette is starting to glitch and fade, except that it makes tiny what once was gigantic. Still it’s better than nothing. He left the tape at the end of the mad scene the last time he put it on, so he only has to squibble back through eighteen minutes and there she is again, bloodstained, astonishing, throbbingly distraught. Tenors, Vern has been known to sing along to while he drives and no one can hear the heartfelt mess he makes. But the sopranos, he can’t even aspire to. He just listens, and lets Dame Joan do the heart-work for him.
Past Eltham, and the traffic lights begin, puddled red-amber-green on the glass before him. Red-brick walls and closer trees channel the grey light descending from the sopping air, and darken it. As he stops, goes, stirs through sheets of water where the drains have overflowed, the familiar matrix of the city closes around him. The 1930s semis with their triangular raised eyebrows; the Edwardian schools and the brutalist ones; the corner shops now selling lentils and fenugreek; the railway arches filled with little garages; everywhere the plane trees, the sycamores, the horse chestnuts, so wet now they stand like pulpy chandeliers, dribbling and drooling, filtering the light away so the pavements are dim beneath. He’s back under the eaves of his London. It occurs to him that this may be the last time he ever makes this particular commute, and mad Lucia sings –
Un’armonia celeste, di’, non ascolti?
Ah, l’inno suona di nozze!
Il rito per noi s’appresta! Oh, me felice!
Oh gioia che si sente, e non si dice!
Well, Vern, do you hear a heavenly harmony? His face is wet again, although the car is keeping the rain out. But the answer, to be honest, is no. If he thinks about it – and now he is thinking about it – he has never felt anything like what Joan Sutherland reports that Lucia is feeling. He wants to feel it, he lingers hopefully in its vicinity, at least when he’s listening to opera. But to die for love, to run mad for love: those are not states that have ever come near him. Not in daylight. Not to his waking self. The strongest emotions he knows are the angry ones, the ones in the keys of frustration, or rage. Those have come closest to carrying him away, to overthrowing his usual calculating caution. He had hoped, deep down in some well-concealed compartment, some safe-deposit box of his heart, that being married to Kath might wake up some of what the tenors and the sopranos sing about. But it didn’t. Perhaps the big emotions of the operas don’t really exist, perhaps they are a game of let’s pretend that everyone is agreeing to play. Perhaps they are news from a far country that likewise doesn’t exist. He doesn’t know.
He also doesn’t know, on a practical level, what he is going to do. He has no house, he has no money. Well: not quite true, in either case. There’s a small emergency fund waiting for him in the Albemarle office. That’s why he has to go in one more time. And the account it’s in, carefully off the books, is being fed by the rents from the one property he kept mum about when they were organising Albemarle, and didn’t fold into the company’s portfolio. It’s one of the big old houses on Bexford Rise, a horrible thing, gloomy and ancient, with woodwormed windows and plugs that produce blue flashes and burning smells. But the immigrants and students he’s stuffed into it don’t expect any better, and they also don’t know he’s anything but the rent collector. Something, some habit of caution, made him set these things quietly aside, out of Kath’s reach. So now he won’t be starting again absolutely from scratch. He isn’t quite broke; he still has a toehold in property. If he has to, he can even chuck out a student or three and move in himself, though a bed and breakfast appeals more. And all this is better than the aftermath of Grosvenor, when he really did have nothing left, and had to go back to his mum’s for six months.
But what he hasn’t got is a plan. Grosvenor was supposed to be an empire built on shop rents, and it went wrong when the supermarkets wiped out his butchers and greengrocers. Albemarle was his reaction. It was his way of getting into the bigger commercial spaces the chains were demanding. He went as big as he could, but it wasn’t big enough. The only tenants he could get for the Albemarle Minimart were the marginal players, a fly-by-night cash and carry, a franchised dry-cleaner, a non-chain burger restaurant. Now the likes of Sainsbury’s and Safeway are all looking for huge greenfield properties. He couldn’t play in that league when things were looking promising for Albemarle and he certainly can’t now. He’s got to the end of what he can think of to do with commercial property, and it’s a bust. What the hell is left that’s in his reach, except for bloody residential? Oh, he’s done some, you can’t avoid it, you pick up sitting tenants like fleas just as a side effect of doing small commercial: but it’s so dismal, it’s such a dispiriting, damp, low-margin business, in a sector squeezed between council housing and owner-occupiers. You have to play the heavy just to keep a trickle of cash flowing. Water-stained ceilings, missing stair rods, endless complaints: he wants glass towers, not that shit.
It’s maddening. This should be his time. He listens to the news and he thinks: finally, there’s a government that’s on my side. The world should be his oyster, the world should be falling into his lap, the world should be finally giving him what he’s been reaching for all his adult life. And instead he is parking a Mini in spitting rain in an alley half-blocked by a skip, and fumbling with a lock while balancing the net results of his marriage in a soggy cardboard box. Spargi d’amaro pianto il mio terrestre velo: shed bitter tears on your earthly garment, Vern.
The office is dim from the darkness of the day. It has the stale smell of an unused space, and there are mouse droppings on the floor. A watery glow creeps in from the storefront window facing the court of the Minimart, where unlit plate glass declares the death of burger bar, dry-cleaner, cash and carry. The rain outside makes an indistinct drumming, a fuzz of wet noise. He could turn on the light and get some blue-white illumination on the spider plants, the ominous buff envelopes on the mat, the files stacked on the desk. But there’s a kind of comfort in the room being like a cave, a dim hidey-hole. Also a small chance that one of Albemarle’s local creditors might see lights on. He sets the box down and climbs on a chair. Four polystyrene ceiling tiles along from the left wall, three out into the middle of the room. No reason why Kath should ever have done this, and besides, she’s too short to reach, the little bitch. He presses up, and the tile lifts with a squeaky whisper. Sellotaped to the other side of it, undisturbed, are indeed the emergency bank book and a slender packet of brown tenners and purple twenties. Vern feels better just for having them in his jacket pocket.
With the tile out there’s a big obvious gap overhead, and he feels an urge to leave it like that, so that when Kath next comes in here the square of black announces: you missed something, you cow. Better not, though. He has learned not to underestimate her capacity to make trouble. If she deduces there’s an extra asset she will come after it. But it’s difficult. He stands on the plastic chair with the polystyrene in his hands, and it’s so brittle, so granular, so friable. His hands can feel what it would be like to crack it in half, and in half again, raining down white crumbs on the unswept floor. And then to go on. To lumber down from the chair and go on breaking things. Trash the place. Turn round and round like an angry bear in this old den of his, sweeping the files onto the floor, overturning the desk, smashing the glass of the cabinet, throwing the typewriter at the wall. Trampling on the paper underfoot. Pissing on it. Making chaos. Shredding and clawing and flailing. The bitch, the bitch, the bitch.
At the thought of it, his breath comes fast and his hands tingle where he’s gripping the polystyrene. Better not. It feels as if he might fly apart too, if he gives in to the smashing urge – be discovered by Kath in sections, when she comes in, scattered round the office with the rest of the wreckage. He lifts the tile and with trembly delicacy taps it back into place. Tuff. Tuff. Squeak. Then he gets down, one tree-trunk leg and then the other one. And stands, breathing, with his hands over the face.
Cup of tea, that’s what he needs. There’s a kettle in here somewhere. Yes, over there, dusty in the corner, along with most of a packet of Ginger Nuts. He fills it and puts it on to boil, and while he waits, sits at the desk and eats the biscuits one after another till there’s sweet grit packing his teeth and he feels better. He watches the rain on the court-side window run down, branching, slow-slow-quick, briefly mercurial when the grey light catches on the rivulets. The puddles on the concrete outside pock and stipple. The rain has slowed to a finer needle-shower, but the soft blatter of it still carries, mixing with the soothing whirr of the kettle.
Of course, there isn’t any milk, and when it comes to it Vern doesn’t fancy the thought of a milkless mugful, acrid black. But by then he doesn’t care, because he’s had an idea. Not a big idea, mind you, not the kind you build your next business on. But enough of an idea to get him back in the game, maybe – to force the (he checks) two-thousand-odd quid in the emergency account into rapid multiplication and, possibly just as important, to let the voice in his head that tells his life like a story say, Yeah, Vern bounced right back. There’s a bloke he knows called Malcolm Deakin who is planning to go all in on council housing when Right to Buy kicks in next year. Funding for tenants who can’t get mortgages, then the lion’s share of the sale price when the time comes to sell. Deakin’s got his investors lined up and everything. The thing is, Vern has looked into this a little bit, from curiosity, and even though the scheme hasn’t started yet, and there hasn’t been much publicity, the discounts for tenants buying are already available. If someone were to go out on the doorsteps as a kind of unofficial field agent, and sign a few people up now, in advance, he can’t see why Deakin wouldn’t buy them on. He’d save himself the hassle, and he’d be looking at a guaranteed profit. What Vern needs to do is use his two thousand quid to make deals eventually worth seven or eight thou, and then sell them on to Deakin for an instant three or four. Boom. And rinse, and repeat. It’ll have to be flats or maisonettes, not houses, with only two thou to start. But that’s doable.
Vern thinks it through again, carefully, and then types up a couple of documents to take away with him, pecking at the keys with two fingers. Before he goes, he spreads out the ledgers Kath is most likely to need and pours all the water in the kettle over them. The ink floats off the columns in smears and eddies. Take that, sweetheart. On the way out, he locks up, breaks off the key in the lock and posts the stub back through the letterbox. You can pay for a locksmith and all. Right: a fry-up, and then to work.
An hour later, and even the solid savoury ballast of sausage bacon egg beans and a fried slice is not quite able to keep him in good heart. He’s over on the bit of infill estate that patched the bomb damage on one side of Bexford Rise, about two thirds of the way up, and not far from his hulk of a house, which he plans to look in on later. The needling rain is still falling from the low clouds, fine-bore, penetrating. It has penetrated Vern’s brolly. It’s one of those cheap fold-up ones. It isn’t made for a sustained downpour and, crumpled and dainty in a big man’s hand, it doesn’t have the coverage either. His head is merely damp, but his shoulders are soaked. The electric blue of his suit has turned to dark, glistening purple. The extra, wet weight ensures that, though his hands are numb, the rest of him is perversely hot. Overflow from blocked drainpipes sends sheets of wet creeping down the brickwork of the blocks.
So far, no one has answered the door in the row of maisonettes facing the big houses on the Rise. It must be working-age families in here, mostly, and they’re the least likely takers for his proposition. He wants the ill, the old, the lonely. But he thought he’d better work through the maisonettes before heading up to the more probable bets on the seventh floor, the level at which building societies start refusing to lend. A maisonette would be a bigger pay-off than a flat, if he could get one. All this he expected; but it’s still dispiriting to stand there in the wet at door after door, getting his trustworthy smile ready, for no result.
The sixth and last door, however, has signs of life behind it and when he knocks it’s opened, by a stringy, harassed-looking man of about his own age.
‘Yeah?’ he says. Or begins to say. While the word is still in his mouth, a huge voice from upstairs breaks in.
‘Oi! If you’re limping down the street, in new boots so tight they squeak, and your clothes are magnifeek—’
‘Gary!’ shouts the guy in the doorway, turning back towards the stairs. ‘Gary! What have I bloody told you, and bloody told you, about turning down the bloody music?’
‘When the rhythm starts to speak, from Pacifeek to Atlanteek, move yer aching plates of meat—’
‘GARY! Turn off the fucking music!’
‘ONE GIANT LEA—’
And the music stops, or at any rate dwindles so sharply it counts as silence compared to what it was before.
‘Sorry, mate,’ says the man, rubbing his hand wearily on his face. ‘What?’
‘Teenagers, eh?’ says Vern, sympathetically. But before he can get any further, the man in the doorway leans forward and peers at him closely.
‘Good grief,’ he says. ‘It’s Vermin Taylor.’
‘You what?’ says Vern.
‘Sorry! Sorry. Shouldn’t stick you with a school nickname: not fair. But it is you, isn’t it. Vernon Taylor, right?’
‘Do we know each other?’
‘We went to the same primary school. Halstead Road?’
‘That’s right. But, so – who are you?’
‘Alec Torrance,’ says the bloke, and sticks a hand out. Vern shakes it cautiously; and now, knowing what he’s looking for, when he stares at the face in front of him (frazzled, unshaved) he can see a younger version superimposed or maybe coming up from beneath.
‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘yeah … You were the cheeky little bugger, weren’t you? The one who was always winding up whatsisname, the head.’
‘Henry Hardy.’
‘That’s right. Yeah, you used to leave his aitches off on purpose, didn’t you?’
‘’Fraid so, yeah.’
‘And he’d turn red, and he’d go—’
‘At least try to speak properly, boy!’ says the man on the step.
They smile uncertainly.
‘Yeah,’ says Vern.
‘Yeah,’ says Torrance.
But the moment fades quickly away. Bringing the past closer also brings closer the kids they were, the fat boy facing the smart-arse. They didn’t like each other then, and there’s no reason they should like each other now. Vernon hasn’t forgotten being Vermin Taylor, or forgiven it. He’s glad to see that the clever little bugger has grown up to be a bit of a mess. Home in the middle of the day; bedraggled; shouting at his kids; clothes one step up from pyjamas. Definite whiff of failure there. Perhaps this needn’t be a wasted conversation. And the angry bear who was baulked of his wish to mash and to shred earlier makes himself felt. He rises and stretches, somewhere down in Vern, and lets it be known that there’d be some predatory satisfaction in having it be the smart-arse that gets squeezed in the urgent pursuit of recapitalisation.
‘So, what are you up to, then, these days?’ asks Vern, with a different friendliness. ‘Between jobs?’
‘Nah, I’m in the print. Always have been. Typesetter on The Times. Only, you know, we’re out – well, not technically on strike, but it comes to the same thing. Have been for nearly a year.’
Oh. ‘Must be tough,’ says Vern. ‘Hard times, eh?’
‘’S all right,’ says Torrance, bridling slightly and palpably rejecting the sympathy. ‘Mind you, I’m not a very good prospect if you’re selling something. Are you selling something?’
‘I am not a fucking brush salesman!’ snarls Vern, with no warning to himself that he might be about to lose his temper, no appreciable interval between manipulative calm and totally losing it. Zero to rage in nought seconds.
‘Whoa!’ says Torrance, hands up in front of him, eyebrows shooting up too. ‘You’re the one standing on my doorstep, mate.’
‘Sorry,’ says Vern into the hand he has clapped across his face. Big pink clamp, gripping the squidgy mask that is refusing to behave.
Torrance, who had taken hold of the door and was in the process of stepping back to close it, pauses and hesitates.
‘And I thought I was having a shit day,’ he says. ‘Here … d’you wanna come in and have a cup of tea? You’re all wet.’
Ordinarily, Vern would have discarded with scorn any such hideous display of pity – particularly from some up-himself, overpaid, feather-bedding, Spanish-practising, never-taken-a-business-risk-in-his-life tosser of a Fleet Street Bolshevik. But today he finds himself squeezing obediently through a dark little hall hung with coats and into a narrow little kitchen with a table jutting out from the wall that just has room for four chairs round it. Titchy-boom titchy-boom comes the thread of music from upstairs, and Torrance casts an exasperated glance at the ceiling. Rain still wanders down the window over the sink and the view outside is soggy murk. But what Vern notices is that the place, though small, is tidy. Everything is where it belongs. There are biros in a jar next to a phone on the wall. There are photos from family holidays up on a corkboard, and a note about someone going to the dentist. The washing-up has just been done, presumably by the Bolshevik, and the kitchen smells of washing-up liquid and Vim: clean smells, the smells of things working as they should. It looks like the land of lost content, to Vern.
‘Sit down, take the weight off,’ says his host.
‘I’ll get the cushions wet,’ Vern says.
‘Doesn’t matter. Now, here are some Kleenex, and I’ll just put the ke—’
‘My wife threw me out this morning,’ Vern tells the tabletop.
‘Oh, mate! Oh, mate. Right, scratch the tea.’
Torrance fetches down a tumbler and a whisky bottle from a cupboard, and pours Vern a couple of golden fingerfuls. Then he sits down himself opposite, props his forehead on splayed fingers, and clearly prepares to listen.
But Vern doesn’t know how this goes. He slurps the whisky, and it does warm him, but he has no idea how to put the mass of today’s misery into acceptable form; into any form, really, for as well as the problem of keeping the private stuff private, about the business, there’s the underlying difficulty of knowing how to turn any of this stuff into a story in the first place, this stuff about trust, about finding you had no ally.
‘She,’ he tries. ‘I thought,’ he tries.
Torrance waits. But nothing else is forthcoming. A puzzled little crinkle appears between his eyebrows.
‘Well,’ he says eventually, coaxingly, ‘what is it you do do, Vernon?’
‘Property,’ says Vern.
‘Really?’
More silence.
‘I wouldn’t of thought there was much for you round here, then? I mean, it’s all council, isn’t it. Or – ah, I get you. It’ll be that malarkey going on on the Rise you’re into, I suppose?’
‘What malarkey?’ says Vern, wanly.
‘You know – the Saab and Volvo brigade moving in. Hugo and Jocasta. Our new middle-class neighbours who just love the lovely Georgian architecture. Them, right? No?’
‘What, on the Rise?’
‘Yeah, go and look, must be four or five houses, now. But, mate—’
‘I’ve gotta go,’ says Vern, surging to his feet and jogging the little table.
‘Al … right, but …’
Torrance, baffled, follows him to the front door; tries one last time as Vern unfurls the comedy umbrella.
‘Wasn’t there something you wanted?’
‘Nothing you’d be interested in,’ says Vern firmly. ‘Thank you. That was very … kind.’
That was very weird, Torrance’s face is saying plain as pie as the door shuts. But Vern turns away and hurries through the puddles to the alley at the end of the row that leads through to the Rise. It’s still raining, but the needles are turning to drizzle, supplemented by heavier splatters of local drops, where a breeze is beginning to stir the big trees of the Rise and to push at the grey cloudbase.
He comes out by the railings, and there they are, the dark hulks of the Rise, marching up on their long slant as far as he can see to left and right. They go all the way from Lambert Street and the park down at the bottom up to the leafy crown of Bexford Hill. There must be, what, seventy or eighty of the things – grand dwellings once, for bankers and brokers and lawyers and doctors and prospering merchants, promising light and space and a vantage point above the dingy anthill where the fortunes had been made to pay for them. Two hundred years later and almost all of them are what Vern has always taken them to be: run-down, mislocated, impractical nightmares, too big to repair or to do anything with except cram with the least demanding of tenants till the day comes for demolition. Everywhere you look there’s ingrained soot, cracked stucco, streaks of water damage, black bricks bulging or showing cracks where the pointing has fallen out. The railings have all been missing since they were taken away during wartime drives for scrap, the areas are choked with rubbish. There’s the scaly grey of old, old dirt on the windowpanes.
But Torrance is right. Trotting uphill and down again, Vern spots one, then another, then another, of the houses he was talking about. These ones do indeed have parked outside them an elderly green Saab, a mossy Audi, a silver Volvo estate missing one of its hubcaps: not glamorous, not conventionally posh, yet unmistakably the vehicles of the artsy bourgeoisie. The Saab has two bottles of wine and a sack of cement on the back seat. And the cars correspond to houses with scaffolding on them, with paint-stripped or partially paint-stripped front doors. One of these has ground-floor windows brilliantly lit, through which you can see walls painted a fresh white, hung with little grey rectangles of pictures. Another seems dark, and Vern has strolled up the front path to take a squint before he sees flickers of yellow inside, and finds he’s looking at a bearded guy in overalls stripping wallpaper by the light of, yes, three candles in a knackered old paint-dripped candelabra, an actual fucking candelabra, the light fitting overhead hanging down broken by its wires.
None of it gives the impression of work with much of a budget behind it. It’s enthusiastic amateur stuff. The Saab-drivers are doing middle-class homesteading out here in the wilderness of Bexford. Which means, which must mean, that they love all this; that they positively want the wonky eighteenth-century grates, and the cracked oak floorboards under the geological sediments of lino and plywood and underlay, and the bowed old lath-and-plaster behind the layers of cheap wallpaper. Want it enough to do for themselves, on the cheap down here, what they wouldn’t be able to afford if it had stayed posh, if it had remained in good nick over the centuries, as in, say, Belgravia. Which means, Vern thinks, that for every out-and-out bearded architectural fanatic willing to do the job on their own account, there might well be, in fact there almost certainly must be, a whole bunch of slightly less fanatical people with the same tastes, who’d pay to have a house like this sorted out for them.
He stares so hard at the man in overalls, thinking this through, that in the end he feels Vern’s gaze, and turns, and jumps, finding an oval blue spectre looming in the wet darkness of his doorstep. Vern nods, and goes away to stand instead on the doorstep of the building he already owns. The umbrella gets in the way, so he folds it, and just ignores the rain as he stares upwards, trying to see something desirable here, something precious. The house looms above him, a crumbling black cliff. Old, old, old, say his own reactions, meaning by that: chewed up by time, used up by time, in a funny way contaminated by time, as if all the lives lived in this heavy rookery for humans, first the posh ones with the wigs and the ball dresses, then all the ever-poorer clerks and labourers and flotsam from around the world, with their coughing children, and their meals cooked on gas rings in dirty corners, have made it impossible for there ever to be a fresh start here, a new beginning, there being so much living and dying already ingrained here, stuck to surfaces like grease, laid down in scungy thicknesses. There’s something else too, a horrible rumour that sometimes things – objects – exist on a longer and slower cycle than the living one, that sometime they outlast us, overshadow us, will still be standing when we are removed as mortal rubbish, however much we’d prefer it to be the other way round, with our frayed possessions discarded but our skins immortal. Ugh. He wouldn’t live here. He’s definitely going to a B&B. But: antique, antique, antique is what he has to train himself to think, he supposes. He had better read up on what the incomers want, in case he cleans away some grubby old thing they cherish. Or get someone to explain it to him. Perhaps that’s been the error of his businesses all along. He kept wanting to make things happen, when he should have found something that was happening anyway, and just gone along with it.
But he will need capital, if he’s going to start buying up and doing up the Rise, and Deakin is his best quick source for it, he reckons. So as the rain dies away into drips, and a knot of brightness begins to untie in the clouds, he’s back over in the flats, working his way along the concrete walkway of the seventh floor, knocking and knocking and knocking, until eventually one opens, and there stands a beautifully confused-looking pensioner in his undershirt.
‘Hello,’ says Vern warmly. ‘I represent … Featherstone Investments. How would you, sir, like to make two thousand pounds, right now?’
Mike gets headaches. Bad enough ones that they lay him out for half a day at a time, unable to bear the light. The brewery is starting to complain about the shifts he’s missing. Today’s a Saturday, though, so he isn’t needed for work, and he lies in the bedroom at half past ten in a mess of sheets, with his eyes closed tight even against the tiny leaks of November daylight that make it through the slit in the curtains. It’s so dim in there by ordinary standards that it takes her eyes a minute to adjust when she takes him in a mug of tea. (White, three sugars.) There are violet shadows under his eyes, marks of weakness for once instead of the bruises and black eyes he brings home which are strength’s proud badges: or the monstrous swelling of half his head he brought back that one time that someone hit him with a hammer. He looked like a jack-o’-lantern then, and like one was grinning, still grinning. But now a pain has taken hold of him that he didn’t choose and no one inflicted, and it has subdued his face to gentleness. You can see, as well as the delicacy of the coloured skin under his eyes, the tiny crow’s-feet lines coming at their corners. Like her, he’s thirty-nine, and in these moments when he can’t help himself, it shows. Impossible not to feel tenderness, or something like tenderness, standing over his animal length in the sheets, and seeing all that force temporarily laid low. He is the only beautiful thing in her life, as well as being the cause of all the ugly ones. When she makes a clink putting down the mug on the side table, he mumbles ‘Thanks, Mum.’ Then she goes back to the living room to go on cutting corned-beef sandwiches under the portrait of Hitler.
She did manage to coax him to the doctor’s about the headaches. Unfortunately the doctor they got, Dr Sharma, was a young Asian woman. Mike was in his work clothes, but she could still read his tattoos. They glared at each other.
‘I see you work in a brewery, Mr Stone,’ said the doctor. ‘Do you by any chance drink to excess?’
‘This is crap,’ said Mike. ‘I’m not letting her put her hands on me.’
‘Believe me, I have no desire to.’
‘Shouldn’t you at least take his blood pressure, Doctor?’ Val tried. ‘He’s talking about seeing flashing lights and all when he has one of his heads.’
‘I suppose that would be sensible. All right, roll up your right sleeve, Mr Stone.’
‘No!’ said Mike. ‘There’s nothing wrong with my blood. It’s Nordic.’
Dr Sharma laughed.
‘Shut up, you Paki cunt,’ said Mike.
Dr Sharma stopped laughing.
‘I think you’d better leave,’ she said.
‘What’d you do that for?’ Val asked when they were outside.
‘What?’
‘You know.’
‘Well – it’s rubbish, isn’t it love; ’s all crap.’
And he started to do his pavement-clearing strut, with her tagging along behind. Places to go, people to scare. Mike likes people, in a certain kind of a way. He certainly doesn’t like being alone, and he has arranged their lives so they hardly ever are. The top two floors of this block of the Park Estate are BM territory, acknowledged, and the flat is constantly full, evenings and weekends, with Mike’s crew of junior skins and the girls who hang around them, and the older hard men of the Leader Guard like himself. (Though none of the others are quite as old as Mike.) It’s rare that she has a moment to herself, like now, laying out the white squares of the bread to butter for round after round of sandwiches, wrestling open tin after tin of the corned beef they got for virtually nothing when the cash and carry closed. The little keys that you use to wind the cans open do their best to break off, with the slab of red meat and yellow fat inside only half-released. She could turn the radio on, but it isn’t worth the bellow of indignation from the bedroom if the song playing isn’t one Mike approves of. Instead as she works she watches a seagull diving and soaring in the spaces between the tops of the towers, as if the buildings, and the grid of lock-up garages and shopping precinct down below, and then the whole bumpy carpet of London beyond, were only unimportant blanks surrounding its true element.
Twenty rounds of sandwiches done, ten more to go. Who’d have thought that national socialism demanded so many sandwiches? So much sewing, too. As well as Mike’s street clothes, which obviously have to be perfect, she had to make his Leader Guard uniform from scratch. There aren’t enough members of the white race’s vanguard for the uniforms to come from a factory. They have to be home-made. The blue BM crossed-circle came as a machine-embroidered patch, but she was the one who had to get it to work on a khaki shirt, who had to make the jacket and the armband, to improvise the Sam Browne belt. When she and Mike went to that horrible Birthday do, and the wives looked at each other – all dogs, all with the same bleak sourness she sees in the mirror every morning – she saw that the uniforms were all slightly different. And he can’t even wear the thing otherwise. He got photographed in it for his membership card, and now it hangs in the wardrobe in a dry-cleaning bag.
Twenty-nine, thirty: and as she finishes the sandwiches and starts wrapping them up in greaseproof, her little moment of solitude ends too. She hears the whine and clank of the lift, and then the knock on the flat door. It’s Mr Brocklehurst, with his golf club tie and his megaphone.
‘Hello, Mrs Mike!’ he says. ‘Is Himself available? Ha ha?’
‘Bit of a late night last night,’ says Val automatically. ‘I’ll just give him a knock, shall I. Cup of tea while you’re waiting?’
‘That would be splendid.’
She bangs on the bedroom door and puts the kettle back on. While it reboils she can hear the sounds of Mike putting himself together. Brocklehurst lingers awkwardly. He comes here to pet his tigers, and he has no idea what to say to her. She can’t stand him. She can’t stand Mike’s deference to him, as if he represented something grand and serious, instead of a few middle-class weirdos and a cocktail cabinet full of daggers and helmets. It’s been a long time since she took any of it seriously, but at least when Mike talks about it it’s got something to do with … loyalty; with being proud of who they are and where they come from. You can usually rely on Mike’s bright-clean hatred for social workers, lawyers, probation officers, teachers: posh tossers and rich bastards of all descriptions, who were already offensive to him, already stank in his nostrils, before he decided they were race traitors as well. Alone among posh tossers who have had prolonged solo exposure to Mike, Mr Brocklehurst has not gone down in a welter of blood and teeth, and sometimes Val is slightly sorry.
‘What a marvellous spread,’ he says, looking at the mountain of sandwiches. ‘Heavens, how well you do do for us, Mrs Mike.’
Do for us. As if she was a char-lady. She hands him the tea silently. He sips it, though it must be still hot enough to scald.
‘Yes, yes,’ he says. ‘Home-making. The hearth. What it’s all about in the end, isn’t it.’
‘Is it?’ she says. If he thinks this place is homely he must be blind. Everything here is scuffed and trampled by the ceaseless traffic of big male boots. A knackered sofa faces a knackered telly across a knackered carpet. There’s a permanent smell of sweat. It’s like a barracks or a boys’ club, not a home. ‘D’you have kids, Mr Brocklehurst?’ She knows he doesn’t.
‘I’m afraid not, no. Never lucky enough to find the right girl!’
Yeah, just you alone with your collection of Iron Crosses.
A shadow appears on Mr Brocklehurst’s face, as if he fears he has dropped some terrible clanger.
‘I was so sorry to hear from Mike that you two can’t have children,’ he offers, shuffling his feet. ‘Terribly sad. And such a loss to the race, you know, he being the splendid specimen that he is.’
Oh. Oh, is that what Mike told you? She supposes it’s not surprising he’s come up with something along these lines, but it would have been nice to be let in on it. The truth is that the female anatomy makes Mike go all to pieces. It unmans him, which is not a sensation he likes. So on the rare occasions when anything does happen between them, it tends to feature his dick and her mouth; and it’s true, you can’t get pregnant that way. The thought of explaining this to Mr Brocklehurst puts a sour little smirk on Val’s face. He takes a nervous half-step back. That’s a common reaction. Mike may not want her, but she is his, and terror of him puts an exclusion zone around her. She is not to be upset or offended, she is not to be touched.
But then, to Mr Brocklehurst’s relief, the bedroom door opens. The noises in there have been rising: the getting-up noises, the gargling noises, the dunking-of-the-head-in-the-basin noises, the shaking-the-wet-head-like-a-dog noises, the towelling noises, the noises of clothes coming off hangers. The humming. And now here he is, here’s Mike risen from the couch of sleep, in Levi’s and green bomber jacket, grinning and momentarily posing in the doorframe, for the pleasure of all onlookers. A few blinks are the only sign of the head-in-a-vice ache he’s overriding. It’s a triumph of the will. And the familiar, ancient dread tightens its knot in Val’s stomach. When Mike gets up, the clock of the day is wound, and now it will tick on till the day ends; and the day will only end when Mike has had enough. Enough of a laugh. Enough aggro. Enough confrontation. Enough of other people bending to the force in him. Enough bruising and breaking. All day long, she’ll be asking Is this enough yet? Is this?
Now the flow of people has begun, it keeps going, and the flat fills rapidly up with what feels like most of the skins in Bexford, the hard-core BM ones and the larger number of casuals who are into the style as a style, into the tribe for the sake of having a tribe. For them, as far as she can see, the swastikas and the Sieg-Heiling are mostly a matter of having a laugh and winding people up. Yeah, if there’s a ruck then tribal loyalty will do its thing and they’ll fight as Mike’s army. But he wouldn’t ever pick them for the vicious small-group stuff, the night-wandering in search of enemies to do serious damage to. That privilege will not be theirs; and as a result most of them stand a pretty good chance of growing up and growing out of being a skin – ending up as men very much like their dads, shaking their heads over a pint at thirty about the crazy stuff they used to get up to. For that matter, even the hard core may get over all this, luck and prison and broken bones permitting. Even Peaky and Taff, maybe, Mike’s faithful wingmen and wannabes. They’ve got time to change in. They aren’t twenty yet. There was a time when she thought the years might work a transformation on Mike. The usual transformation, from bad lad to man with responsibilities. But Mike won’t let himself be changed. Or can’t. She knows that now.
Once the number of skins in a confined space exceeds a certain density, they start to collide. The sofa is full of bodies already. A lad holding a mug of tea adds himself by sitting on the back of it and then just letting himself fall into the press as if it were a mosh pit, moonface beaming as he goes, tea slopping, everyone’s elbows going.
‘Watch out, the arms’ll break,’ says Val, unheard by anyone but Mike.
‘Oi!’ he roars. ‘Listen when the missus talks!’
And he lessens the pressure on the sofa end by lifting a size-10 immaculately laced sixteen-hole oxblood DM and booting the last two in the row off onto the floor, jovially but not gently. They sprawl there, and with the pressure released, Moonface with the mug does a complete back somersault, tea flying like a twisted brown scarf, and ends up on the floor too, on top of the mug, which shatters. You can tell that the hard ceramic punch under the ribs must have hurt – it’s one of the oddities of shaving a male head that it sometimes lets the little boy show through more clearly in a face – but he’s up in an instant, grinning. Mike looks away. Enough? Not even close. She fetches a dustpan and clears away the bits of china, one of the boys trying to help until distracted by being put in a headlock by his mates. So far as they think of her at all, she can see a familiar confusion on their faces. What is she, this silent woman of Mike’s? She’s not a girl, and she’s not a mum either: mums do not let you behave like this indoors.
But the small kerfuffle on the sofa has served as a signal to get going, and so bumping, jostling, spreading as they go out into the hallway like a gas expanding, they set off. Mr Brocklehurst and his megaphone and his leaflets and two Union Jacks on broom handles go down in the lift; the rest go whooping down ten flights of stairs. She’s in the rearguard, as ever, walking down with the carrier bags of food and the small contingent of girlfriends. (Not a category that includes Fat Marge, who’s been to borstal. She’s an honorary boy.) Being a skin is such a male style that there isn’t really a look for the girls to conform to, as such, except for the compulsory truculence. A couple of them are doing a version of the boys’ style, but braces and tits don’t combine well, and one has got a spiky blonde fringe above massively mascara’d panda eyes – a pretty little thing, that one, only about fifteen, and every time Val looks at her she thinks, What the fuck are you doing here, love?
First stop is the market. On Saturdays it’s in the long slot between Lambert Street and Talbot Road, a double row of stalls between the gas showroom and St Saviour’s. A lot of the streets around have vanished, ploughed under in the making of the Park Estate, but in here Bexford still looks pretty much the way Val can always remember it looking, changed detail by detail rather than being wiped away wholesale. And maybe Brocklehurst has thought about that – or maybe they’ve just gone where the people are – because when the mob of them have pushed their way onto the war memorial steps, and they’ve got Brocklehurst set up between the flags, glaring heads all around his blue blazer, what comes reedily out of the loudhailer, and floats across the stalls selling veg, and the stall piled with acrylic jumpers, and the one doing socks and clock radios, is:
‘Ladies and gentlemen, do you even recognise the place you come from, these days? The place you were born? Look around you. Look around you. They’re taking it away from you – from you, madam, from you, sir. From all of us!’
And people do turn their heads. But the white shoppers don’t look poison at the West Indian and Sikh ones as they’re supposed to do. They cluck their tongues and bob their heads and hunch their shoulders and shrink back without actually moving: all body language saying, stop it and leave us alone. And on the dark faces there’s a stonier refusal to react, though people are also picking a path through the market crowd that keeps them quietly away from the memorial steps. Val, nodding at whatever the girl next to her is saying and not listening to a word, sees a woman her own age two stalls away, buying plantains. (Which they didn’t use to sell on Bexford market, it’s true.) Her face is the colour of a bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, she’s wearing a plaid raincoat, and her hand is on the shoulder of a little boy of about four who is too young to do stoicism, whose face flickers with fear behind the piles of green bananas. The hand is holding him steady. The back of the hand rubs against his cheek. It looks as if it belongs there very comfortably. Shame and envy, envy and shame, flow wearily in Val, and for a moment, yes, kindle to something like the spark of anger Brocklehurst wants her to feel, for why should they have what she lacks, and have it here, in front of her, in her place? But she goes on watching them till they’re out of sight behind backs.
The only person who does react is the punk boy selling Socialist Worker over by South Thames Gas’s window full of cookers. He threads around the back of the market to the phone box and makes a call, and a little later, while Mr Brocklehurst is explaining that the closure of the docks is down to unfair competition from ‘the coloured countries’, the opposition stroll in. Not so much a counter-demo as a counter-mob, in their donkey jackets and ANL badges, wearing boots just as big as the skins’, and with expressions Val finds extremely familiar. She glances at Mike and, yeah, sees the same eagerness, mirrored. This is the fun stuff, this is what they’re there for, not Brocklehurst’s speech. A metal shutter goes down on the shoe shop by St Saviour’s; the nearest stall holders start to pack their stock away.
But before the tooth-baring grins and the pointing fingers and the rest of the male fighting display can wind itself up to actual blows, an elderly drunk comes wandering into the space between, at the foot of the steps. Skinny, with several days of white stubble, wearing an ancient none-too-clean suit, and clearly with several pints in him from the Feathers (open early on market day).
‘Get out the way, Grandad, you’ll get hurt,’ says one of the lads in the front row of the antis, impatiently.
The drunk dismisses him with a vague fluttering hand over his shoulder, and points a finger of his own at the skinheads.
‘You,’ he says slushily – he hasn’t got the teeth for the consonants – ‘should be fakkin ashamed of yourselves. Standing here—’
‘Come on, move it,’ says the anti.
‘Yeah, fuck off now,’ agrees Mike. ‘We’re busy.’
‘—standing here,’ the drunk goes on regardless, ‘wearing that. That!’ He’s pointing to Peaky’s swastika. ‘When all the men who’s’ve got their names on that wall behind you, they fakkin died to keep you safe from that, that … evil thing, you little prick.’
‘That’s enough, now,’ says the anti, again. But the one next to him, a curly-haired lecturer type who carefully took off his glasses as he stepped up, though he’s holding a plank, is smiling now. He thinks this bit of accidental street theatre is good politics.
‘No, let him have his say. Go on, mate; you tell ’em.’
‘I don’t need your fakkin permission,’ says the drunk, who in his own way is just as belligerent as all the other men there. ‘Where was I?’ he adds, less impressively.
‘I expect you was just about to tell us you was in the fucking desert with Monty,’ says Peaky.
‘No, I wasn’t, you cheeky little sod. I was in an AA battery on Blackheath, trying to shoot down aer-o-planes that had that on the fakkin side of them. And watching London burn. So if you don’t like it here, you know what you should do? You should complain, right, to your friends in the fakkin Luftwaffe who blew all the fakkin holes in it. Right?’
‘Look, sir,’ says Mr Brocklehurst unwisely, ‘no one is ungrateful for your service. The European war was a tragic conflict, in many ways, egged on by international finance—’
‘Fakk off,’ says the drunk. ‘I’m not talking to you. Who are you? A ponce in a tie.’ At this, Peaky and several of the younger skins smile helplessly. ‘No! No! Don’t you grin at me! You’ve got nothing to fakkin grin about. It’s you I’m talking to. You are fakkin from here, and them names behind you are your dads’, and your grandads’, and your fakkin uncles’, and you know what you are doing, with this Narzy nonsense? You are fakkin spitting on them. And you should be ashamed.’
He’s almost crying, the easy tears of drunkenness, and everyone is embarrassed.
‘Right,’ says Mike quietly, ‘if you don’t move out the way, you poxy old pisshead, I am going to break your fucking spine.’
But the police have arrived by this time, a minibus full of the busies who come pushing into the stand-off with truncheons out. They aren’t always necessarily unfriendly to the BM and the National Fronters, or averse to putting the boot in themselves. The big march in Lewisham earlier in the year essentially turned into a gigantic three-sided punch-up, skins and anti-fascists and the boys in blue all whaling away on each other. Here and now, though, in front of this audience of shoppers and called out by one of the shopkeepers or maybe the vicar of St Saviour’s, they are the blue full stop to what both sides were looking forward to. Mike’s army withdraws, muttering. Val checks Mike’s face, and sees the disappointment she expects. Is that enough? No!
And his luck doesn’t seem to improve as the day goes on. Mr Brocklehurst goes back to Surbiton in his Hillman Hunter. Then it drizzles on the rest of them in Bexford Park as they eat the sandwiches, a damping that takes the fun from the game of claiming territory and scaring the black families out of the adventure playground. Veils of wet blow slowly over the slide and the merry-go-round. Fat Marge knees Taff in the balls harder than she meant, and he goes limping off home. Then the girlfriends, getting loudly bored, manage to detach some of the younger casuals, and they go off to do what you can do in a bus shelter with a bottle of Mac Market cider whatever the weather, despite the lure of the footie to come. And then it turns out the match isn’t much of a lure anyway. Mike doesn’t believe in women on the terraces, so he parks Val in a caff outside the Den along with one of the older hard men’s wives: Jeanie, who in fact Val works with in the furniture shop in the precinct below the Park towers. Mike found her the job, of course. He likes her to be where someone he knows can keep an eye on her. Weekday or weekend, they don’t have a lot to say to each other. Val hasn’t got the currency of family chat to pay into conversation. Now they smoke and drink deep-brown teas and cock an ear to the sound coming out of the Den; and when the men come back, the pissed-off look on Mike’s face has only deepened, because the game was an easy 2–0 victory for the Lions against Bournemouth, and maddeningly good-tempered throughout, because who can be fucked to hate bloody Bournemouth. Enough? Fuck off.
By this time Val is praying quietly for him to find someone to thump. Please, please, please. Something soon, and something not too bad. The evening looks promising: they’re going to a gig up in Camden, a skin-friendly band of white boys making skin-friendly music. (Which means ska; which means Jamaican music; which means the hated nig-nogs are also somehow on the twisted quiet being loved, at least for their capacity to produce Prince Buster and Byron Lee and the Skatalites. It didn’t do to think too hard about this.) An expedition up to alien NW1, loads of strangers, a pint or three: surely there’s scope there to get Mike safely satisfied.
On the Tube going north they occupy the end carriage of the train. Peaky and the lads ensure that no one else gets into it by standing arms outspread at the opening doors at every station, and grinning. Mike seems subdued, though. He doesn’t even join in when they spot a possible pooftah on the down escalator at Camden Town while they’re all riding up to the surface. The others go leaping and stomping downward to try to cut the target off – he gets away before they reach the bottom – but Mike only stands there, staring at his feet, his jaw grinding. ‘Is your head still hurting, love?’ she asks. ‘No!’ he says vehemently, as if it’s a betrayal by her to even ask.
A pint helps. The second pint helps even more. And when they go into the Electric Ballroom he’s almost jaunty. There’s so many skins in there, BM skins and NF skins and casuals, from every point of the London compass, that it’s like a gathering of the clans. Boots and braces, pork-pie hats and Fred Perry shirts and crombies as far as the eye can see, and the stage lighting gleaming on hundreds of naked male heads, surging and shifting together like white crumbs, or like the beans in baked beans. (‘There you go, skinheads on a raft,’ Val says to Mike when she makes him beans on toast for tea. It makes him smile every time.) They’re all the same, or nearly all the same, and it’s good-humoured. There’s a certain amount of shoving and showing-out going on – the Bexford boys move onto the floor like a phalanx, with Mike at its tip, but the inevitable collisions are happy ones, as if everyone on all sides is on their honour not to care when they go sprawling. It’s a Home stand with no Away stand, it’s an Us with no Them to hate, and it seems to make the big-kids aspect of being a skin come to the fore, as if the whole venue (barring a few exceptions like Val, parked against a fire extinguisher on the back wall) is filled with man-sized nine-year-old boys, having a laugh. In the flow and crush of the crowd she glimpses Mike from time to time, skanking with his shirt off, beautiful in motion as ever, and for once almost innocent in his pleasure at carving a clean line through the world. Maybe, for once, this might be enough. Maybe an actual good time, with no broken skin, will send the beast to bed content?
But then the support act comes on, and it turns out they’ve got a black singer, which will have been a fine thing on the 2-Tone tour round the country the headline band were on just now: but it goes down like the proverbial cup of cold sick with this audience. Suddenly aggro is back on the menu. They won’t let them play. They roar, they boo, they bellow, they throw cans and bottles. The support band retreat, and the lead singer of the evening’s big draw, the head Nutty Boy himself, comes out to the mike to reason with the crowd.
‘C’mon,’ he says, ‘give ’em a chance, yeah? They’re great.’ And then when that doesn’t work, ‘Come on! I know you’re better than this.’ And then when that doesn’t work, he visibly loses his temper. Other members of the band come out and have a try. ‘You’re here for fun, not politics, aren’cha?’ says the one who dances about down the front in shades with his chest out. ‘Well, we’re not playing till they do,’ says the saxophonist in the end: and that does it, that causes a groan to run through the whole crowd; and splits it, and reveals that if you subtract the casuals and all the skinheads who really do care most about the music, there isn’t anything like a majority in the place for a firm Nazi no. Val can see Mike’s head turning from side to side as he discovers he isn’t there with a band of pure-bred brothers after all. The openers come back on, and this time the protests are small enough to ignore, this time when the first song kicks off most people politely dance, and the bassline drowns the rest.
Mike isn’t dancing. He’s standing there, scowling at the stage. He goes on not-dancing when the main set finally begins and the place goes crazy to the rising saxophone wail at the beginning of ‘One Step Beyond’. Now he’s on the outside of the tidal pleasure that’s lifting the crowd. Now he’s just part of a sour little refusal, a Sieg-Heiling sprinkle of holdouts, an outcast from shared joy.
And when the set’s done, the lead singer, lathered up with sweat and with the elation of being joy’s conductor, looks at the island of Hitler salutes, and sneers. ‘All right,’ he says, ‘I can see what you are. I’ve got eyes, haven’t I?’ It’s contempt in his voice, loud and plain.
What’s worse, when they’re leaving, when they’re all draining back out onto Camden High Street, it becomes clear that the split in the crowd is reproduced within the troop from Bexford. Most of the lads had a great time. Mike’s fury is a minority fury. Whatever their usual deference to him, just now they don’t want to hear about how crap it was, not when they’re buzzing, they’re laughing, they’re clomping off into the Tube station. They’re fooling about. They’re fooling about and being twenty. They’re ready to run down the escalator three steps at a time. ‘Cheer up!’ they say. ‘We’ll see yer tomorrow!’ Amazingly fast, there’s just her, Mike and Peaky left.
‘Never mind, love,’ she says, carefully.
He ignores her.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘it’s not that late. I think we’ll go for a little walk’ – and he and Peaky exchange glances.
This is not a part of his life she has ever been taken along on, or ever wanted to be. The dread in her stomach clutches tighter.
‘P’raps I better go home,’ she says.
‘On your own? Nah,’ says Mike.
So she has to follow, picking along behind the bulk of them in the orange sodium lights. It’s busy, this unknown region of North London, with punters in the kebab shops and the minicab offices, the blue flashing lights of panda cars going by, and a different mix of human beings from the one down at home. Too many of them, considering it’s only Mike and Peaky. They turn off into a side street, and suddenly there’s nobody around at all, seemingly, just parked cars bumper to bumper, and tall prosperous-looking houses with thick curtains tightly drawn. Also no good for prey. But up at the end there’s a little concrete car park, a kind of baby multi-storey with only two levels, and somebody is in there. There’s a car down on the lower level with its inside lights on and its bonnet open. Someone is trying the engine and getting nothing but clicks and wheezes from the starter.
‘Problem, mate?’ asks Mike from the top of the ramp, and the marooned driver looks up. It’s a mild-faced, big-eyed, studenty-looking young Indian bloke, all on his own, and smiling uncertainly, for Mike is a skinhead, but Mike sounds friendly, genial. Something warm is stirring in his voice, and Val knows what it is.
‘Just a little bit of engine trouble, sir,’ says the student, and his voice is Indian-Indian, not London-Indian. Perhaps he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be afraid of.
‘Well, let’s have a look, then,’ says Mike. ‘Perhaps we can sort you out.’
Peaky giggles, but Mike is straight-faced. There was in fact a time last year on the way to Brighton when a family with a breakdown were sent on their way by a suddenly helpful carful of skins, ‘compliments of the British Movement’, Mike having seen on the telly where the Hell’s Angels sometimes did that in America, and liking the way it induced first fear and then relief. But that family was white. And that was Mike having a good day.
Down the ramp they go: concrete pillars and concrete floor and concrete ceiling, all stained shadowy orange. Mike and Peaky pretend to look under the bonnet, leaving her for just an instant alone with the student. (Peter Iqbal, she will discover he was called, at the trial.)
Run, she mouths at him. But he goggles at her politely, and doesn’t get it.
‘Aha!’ says Mike. ‘There’s your problem. In there – no, there, mate – right at the back – look—’
And then the bonnet slamming down on the boy’s head, and the kicking beginning, and Peter Iqbal hauled up against a pillar so Mike can work on him with his fists, and with every punch Val thinking Is that enough? Is that? and Peter Iqbal’s face a whimpering mess and Peaky having a go and Peter Iqbal falling down again and more kicking and the noises the kicks make getting more liquid and Peaky getting tired and being ready to stop and Val thinking Please God let that be enough and Mike stepping back and Mike’s face still working with an undischarged petulance and Mike stepping back in and starting to stamp on him and Peaky saying ‘Er – mate?’ and Mike not stopping and Peaky looking at her and Val swallowing and saying ‘That’s enough now’ and trying to grab his arm and Mike who has never once hit her throwing her off and Val bouncing off the Cortina next along and falling on the concrete and seeing under the car Mike’s boot coming down and down on Peter Iqbal’s head and Peter Iqbal’s head not being the right shape any more and blue lights coming too late too late and enough enough enough, that’s enough.