Ronnie used to tell Pearl that the gap between her front teeth was attractive in the manner of film stars with an imperfection or quirk in their looks. Ronnie took her to the pictures at the Aurora and laughed at Pearl when she wondered at the size of everything. At cowboys mounted on great dream-horses riding across the screen and actresses accepting giant kisses on their flawless lips.
Ronnie brought Pearl into the library. They looked up words in the French dictionary. Vierge meaning virgin. Ronnie said the French teacher was a ride. Un rideau. That’s not French, you twit, Pearl said. Le mort, Ronnie said. That’s the word for death.
Ronnie and Pearl would go down town after school. The boys from the Abbey and the High School waited for buses at the Stonebridge and at the Mall. The mass of boys frightened Pearl, the sense of mob about them, everything seeming on the edge of control, the boys keeping it like that, the milling bodies, massed in the narrow walkways. Ronnie would walk through the middle of them, gathering their attention to her. Relishing the jostle, the half-understood innuendos. The way the boys wanted to handle you, pull your bra strap, snatch the grip from your hair. Pearl wanted to tell her not to. Terrible longings were being brought to bear.
‘It wouldn’t be the cubs I’d be afraid of,’ Ronnie said drily, ‘it’d be them that sired them.’
‘They don’t know themselves,’ Pearl told her, ‘they don’t know what class of a thing they can do.’
As if Pearl foresaw the boys’ fates, the coming-of-age dramas that were to befall them, the way that they could be engulfed by malefaction. Dark spirits of teenage suicide, of accidental drownings, of pranks going wrong, slumped over the wheel in a ditch at 2 a.m. The insults and dirty talk were the chanted elegies of their age. ‘They know what’s up ahead,’ Ronnie said. ‘They know the odds.’
‘Boys are thick as planks,’ Ronnie told Pearl, ‘girls aren’t like that. At least I’m not. I’m an old-fashioned girl at heart. You’re different, Pearl. People look at you different to me. Give the likes of me ten years I’ll be dragging a pram down Hill Street with some ne’er-do-well husband hanging out of me. Girl’s got to enjoy herself while she can.’
Ronnie seeing Pearl in a homely light. Picking out soft furnishings in Foster Newell’s home department. A Housing Executive semi-detached in the Meadow. The longed-for verities of a well-kept home.
In the evenings they would drink coffee in Falloni’s or the Satellite. They would read through the entertainment pages of the Belfast Telegraph and imagine themselves pulling up outside music venues in the city, the Boom Boom Room, or the Maritime Hotel or the Orchid Blue.
‘You’ll get to them places, Pearl,’ Ronnie would say, ‘one of these days.’
Ronnie’s mother bought True Crime magazine and Ronnie would bring it into school to show it to Pearl. Terrible depravities were hinted at. Fraudsters who worked their way into the heart of a family the better to satisfy their monstrous urges. A variety of post-industrial locations were evoked. Laybys. Motorway rest stops. Malefactors seemed to have access to forests and moors. There were dismemberments and mutilations. There were tales of dogged police work and lucky breaks.
Ronnie said that Pearl was a loner. Pearl would take the bus to the Point in wintertime. Like Robert she was drawn to the seawater baths. Like a lot of people from the Newry area she had learned to swim there. The baths were closed for the winter and the wind drove waves over the walls. Weed hung in swags from the railings, and seawater gathered on the cracked tiles. The baths were filled by tidal sluices. She had always been afraid to swim in the deep end.
She liked to read about Brigitte Bardot and sometimes when she walked along the front at Warrenpoint she imagined herself in the South of France. The towns of Monaco and Nice. Le Promenade des Anglais. She always thought of it as being winter time when the towns were sparsely populated, the tourists gone home until the following year. Chairs stacked in the seafront cafes. She imagined that she stood on a faraway harbour wall listening to a cold mistral driving sand across the bathing beaches, the breakwaters and empty lidos.
At the weekends cars lined up in the square in front of the amusements in Warrenpoint. The Hillmans and Sunbeams and Cortinas. Men combing their hair in the wing mirrors. The Newry girls walked up and down in front of them. Pearl liked to watch them from a distance. You got the gleam of T-cut panels and chrome trim, deep lustres in the turbulent night. The men going for the GI cuts. Going to the barber’s on Saturday morning to get quiffs, southbacks, looking for the strut that would come with the haircut and the Sta-prest trousers.
Pearl would take the last train from Warrenpoint to Newry and walk home through the graveyard in Kilmorey Street. Glass jars stood on graves with wilted flowers in them. She stayed away from the old part. There was a sense of rigid Calvinists there, her wintry forebears. She paused in front of the graves of infants. It brought a tear to your eye to think of them alone in the dark and sometimes their mothers left toys or brightly coloured clothing there. She thought of small white coffins with toys on top of them. She imagined her own melancholic funeral and who would be there and who would shed a tear at her passing, a tear unnoticed by all save one. A secret lover for ever true. Pearl liked to give herself up to ravaging sentiment. She would read out magazine stories to Ronnie of odds defied, of young love’s triumph.
At fifteen Pearl went to Newry Technical College to study bookkeeping. After her death Ronnie said that there was a side to her that she did not know. Pearl began to join the boys who smoked behind the chemistry block at breaks. They stood at the gable wall underneath the fume vent for the chemistry lab. On still days sulphurous clouds hung in the air and they went back to class smelling of the wreathing vapours. Pearl smoking the cigarette down to the maker’s crest. On winter evenings after school they would smoke in a derelict house on the street while they waited for the bus, the evenings drawing in and the nights giving way to small-town gothic. Pearl’s voice was starting to acquire a throaty tone. She admitted to Ronnie that she practised it in the bathroom mirror at night, forming her lips, looking for the voguish overtones.
On her own in the Tech library Pearl continued to take down the Oxford French dictionary and pick out sexual terms. Using her forefinger to underline the words. Vierge meaning virgin. Froideur meaning frigid. It was a word that she kept hearing. Ronnie said that boys only said it because they were scared of her. Pearl had a way of withdrawing into herself. There was a stillness that seemed to emphasise a growing exoticism in her features. Her Chink look, Ronnie called it. It was imperious, almost haughty. Don’t be looking down your big long beak at me, Ronnie would say, and the look would disappear as Pearl started to laugh.
At school it was Ronnie brought the long pleated brown skirt to Pearl who pinned it up for her. Ronnie making sure she wore her skirt shorter than any other girl in the school. Other girls made arch remarks to her in the corridors but Ronnie didn’t care. She had a way of walking down the corridors. Sashaying, she called it. I’m just going to sashay down to the cloakroom. If there were remarks about Pearl then Ronnie would speak up for her.
‘Never mind them saucy bitches, pay them no heed,’ Ronnie said.
Pearl went out with Davy Higgins from the Meadow. He took her up Shannon’s Avenue.
‘She’s a prick tease,’ he said, ‘all over you and then nothing. Sits up right in the middle of everything and says she’s going home.’
The town had a tradition of musical theatre. Pearl wanted to join and asked Ronnie to come with her.
‘I bet there’s plenty of talent,’ Pearl said.
‘Full of homos as far as I can see,’ Ronnie said. But she agreed to come to rehearsals with the Newpoint players.
Pearl liked the Town Hall theatre. An ornate red-brick building that straddled the river on three arches. There was a sense of provincial civics at work, the well-off of the town gathered in the midwinter, local grandees in the ornate boxes, plump and venal, the mill owners and shipping agents. Middle-aged men looking you up and down, the idea of provincial masqued balls, people gathering from the outlands bringing with them the feeling that somewhere just out of sight another unimagined life was being carried on, a sexual guile in the glances that followed you around the theatre. Going onstage to do the show tunes, the comic operas, works that carried some sad and sinister charge under the glib lyrics. Something afoot in the backstage hush, the dusty storage rooms and rehearsal space.
Pearl wanted to join the chorus but found that it did not suit her. The director of the drama group, Mrs Hollywood, understood.
‘Ronnie is the outgoing one,’ Pearl said.
‘Outgoing is one word for it,’ Mrs Hollywood said. ‘With your expertise you’ll be able to help with the make-up. We’re the backroom girls.’ Mrs Hollywood made it feel like some cheery wartime service. Mrs Hollywood wore too much foundation, its grains gathered in the roots of her hair. She smelled of Parma violets.
She’d wink at Pearl when the performers panicked or became tearful. She tutored Pearl in theatrical traditions and superstitions. Touching wood and not speaking the name of the Scottish play. Mrs Hollywood referred to Pearl as her ‘right-hand woman’, and Pearl was content to be part of the backstage crew. Ronnie started off full of enthusiasm but after a few weeks she stopped turning up.
Pearl told Ronnie she would like to go far, far away some day. Pearl told Ronnie she would go up to the railway line on her own at night. She used to watch the trains going past on the viaduct. She wondered who the travellers were. Their presence on the train seemed to remove them to a different order of existence. They had different concerns. The lit carriages in lyric passage through the night.
When she left school Pearl got a job behind the beauty counter in Foster Newell’s department store on Hill Street. The era of shortages was just coming to an end, the time of rationing. The utility years stretched out behind them, the cheerless post-war decade. She had a mirrored counter with fluorescent lights overhead. She sold Rimmel and Givenchy products. These were forerunners of the years to come, the largesse starting to build.
The ladies coming in to her. The wives and daughters of the merchant families of the town. There was something ravaged about them, an air of fortunes in decline. Pearl would write down their orders using their married names. Their husbands initials were included in the names. Mrs J. A. Graham. Mrs D. B. Stapleton. Pearl thought it gave the names a metropolitan weight. It sounded as if they were being announced at the top of a marble staircase before sweeping down into the glittering night below. Pearl longed to be like them. She imagined herself standing outside the Orchid Blue wearing a pillbox hat with a veil and long gloves. She wanted the complex look the women had. The appearance of being weighed down by melancholy burdens.
The cosmetics counter looked out onto Hill Street. Evening time. Pearl would lean on the counter looking out onto the darkening and rainblown street outside. Traffic was sparse. Pedestrians walking quickly. There were grave matters to be weighed in her own heart and this always felt like the time to do it. Pearl subject to an edge-of-life feeling. Of things going on without her.
They barely looked at Pearl. She held a hand mirror for them so that they could sample the lipsticks. She handed tissues to them so that they could wipe off the excess, pressing their lips to it and leaving the imprint on the tissue. Pearl wondered if you could identify them from the tissue afterwards, pick out the whorls and ridges like policemen did with fingerprints.
‘There’s men in this town would pull the whole face off you, never mind the lips,’ Ronnie said, ‘and the fingernails is never that clean either.’
It was said afterwards that the ladies liked Pearl. She was chatty and literal. Pearl told Ronnie that she would like to be like one of the married ladies. She told Ronnie she liked the way they used their husbands’ initials as part of their names. Mrs D. G. Waring. Ronnie had started to work as a waitress in the Golf Club.
‘You think so,’ Ronnie said, ‘you want to be around the husbands so you do. All hands when they think nobody’s looking. Mr A. D. Grope. Mr X. B. Bumgrab.’
It didn’t stop Ronnie from going off in a car with one of the club members, a bank official called McKnight with a house on the Mall. Pearl rarely saw Ronnie at the weekends unless it was in the bank official’s Humber.
‘He keeps a Frenchie in his wallet,’ Ronnie said. ‘He showed it to me. “Be prepared, that’s my motto,” says he. He can prepare all he likes, says I. If he’s looking for a girl like that he can go up to the Mill. I’m not doing the deed with the likes of that. He’ll put no bun in this oven.’
Pearl suspected that Ronnie had started to do the deed with McKnight. McKnight made her nervous, the way he looked her up and down. He had a moustache and wore suits from Burton or C&A. He was spivish and knowing. Ronnie would meet him in the Satellite cafe after work and she got Pearl to come along.
‘He’s always late,’ Ronnie said, ‘and I don’t want to be sitting there on my tod with a big head on me waiting for the likes of that.’
The Satellite cafe was a chip shop on the corner of Kilmorey Street. A satellite had been painted on the gable wall, a Sputnik. Ronnie thought it was sinister. Pearl wanted to know the science. She had read articles about space exploration. Soyuz rockets blasting off from Siberia. She liked its sinister aerialled look, carrying some deep-space payload. She thought how alone it must be, out there beyond the asteroid belts, among the spiral nebulae. When she mentioned this Ronnie laughed.
‘There’s plenty of lonely to go around down here, never mind outer space.’
But Pearl kept her mind on the science of it. She remembered reading about Marie Curie. The discoverer of radium. How the radioactivity had eaten away at her bones, working into the deep cell structures, but the Frenchwoman had kept working to the end, her features bathed in sickly luminescence. Pearl could see herself like that. Beautiful and doomed.
McKnight was half an hour late. Ronnie kept looking at the door. They sat in leatherette banquettes and drank coffee with steamed milk. When McKnight came in he sat between Pearl and Ronnie. He put his arm around Ronnie. Pearl could smell Old Spice. He kept on at Ronnie about the way she dressed, about hemlines, the shade of her lipstick, how much cleavage she showed, the freckled expanse that she thought of as being open to appraisal. There was a kind of sensuous aplomb about her that men liked.
Pearl kept feeling his thigh against hers. He had a way of inching towards you. Ronnie was no help. She was too busy smoking McKnight’s Lambert and Butlers. Pearl noticed that Ronnie had love bites on her neck just under the collar of her blouse. It made her look wounded and imperilled like some bruised princess. To get away from him she kept getting up and going to the Wurlitzer. She liked Elvis Presley. How he sounded, the stately chords. She kept playing ‘It’s Now or Never’ over and over. McKnight laughing at her.
She saw Robert and Will come in. They sat down at the table in the window. She knew Robert to see but he was seven years older than her and she had never spoken to him. He had been in England for a while and she knew that he had been in trouble with the law. He stood out because of the way he dressed. He wore drainpipe trousers and suede shoes and combed his hair back in a quiff.
‘Them McGladderys,’ her mother said, ‘they were neither reared nor let alone.’
Robert had mitched school. He had burgled a house in Drumalane. He hung around the pool halls and bars of the town with others. It was a small-town thing. Once you acquired the delinquent reputation, the truant shadow, it never left you.
Will noticed that Pearl was uncomfortable with McKnight and kept getting up to go to the jukebox.
‘That boy McKnight’s trying to feel up the Gamble girl, you heard it here first,’ Will said. ‘Why don’t you have a go at her yourself. See if she’ll come up the Avenue with you. Bet you’d get the lot.’
It was part of Will’s narrative. Going up the Avenue with girls, getting the lot. The tit. The bush. The box.
The next time Pearl went to the jukebox Will was there first.
‘Don’t think much of the company you’re keeping. He’s bad news that chap.’
‘Hark who’s talking,’ Pearl said back, pert as you like, she told Ronnie afterwards.
‘Put the knife back in the drawer, Miss Sharp,’ Will said. ‘You like Elvis?’
‘What’s it to you anyhow?’
‘That’s for me to know and you to find out.’
They watched the jukebox, its gimcrack mechanisms like something from early robotics selecting the 45.
‘I worked as a jukebox engineer in London.’
‘I bet you never.’
‘Swear to God. I can fix anything.’
They listened to Elvis. Deferring to the darkness in the voice, the picked-out chords and backroad harmonics. The drawn-out delinquent vowels.
‘Me and you could run away together,’ Will said, ‘take to the highway. Leave this lot behind. A girl like you.’
Pearl looked at him, wondering if he was joking. She hadn’t come across the road-dream that the Yanks had, the myth of the highway, the American road-lore. They watched the vinyl 45 dropping into place in the jukebox and the jittery arm coming across.
‘In Alaska they got one road goes for a thousand miles, straight as a die. You never seen the like of it. They got trains that go on so far they take a day to pass.’
‘The only one’s going on around here is you,’ Pearl said, pleased with herself, feeling she was getting the banter right, setting the texture of the moment. Trying to think of herself as a town girl, a lippy street type. Giving him the backchat.
‘You’re a right little miss, aren’t you?’ Will said. Smiling at her. Letting her know that Pearl had got his number, a small-town charmer on the make. Pearl thinking there was no harm in it.
‘Any chance you’d take a walk with me?’ Will said.
‘I don’t go walking with boys I don’t know,’ she said.
‘Do you do anything else with them?’ Will said, leaning into her, Pearl’s face going blank, backing away from him, waiting for the response, the hissed-out word. Frigid.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m going back to my friends.’
‘Go on,’ he said, ‘I don’t go out with yellow people anyhow.’
When she got back to the table Ronnie was sniffy. She didn’t think much of Pearl’s choice of companion. She said Will was a perv, that McGladdery was a show-off. A fancy Dan.
You’re some girl to be talking, Pearl thought. Pot kettle black, she said in her own head.
‘McKnight says he’s going to leave his wife,’ Ronnie told Pearl afterwards. If you believe that, Pearl thought.
Will wouldn’t stop talking about Pearl when they left the cafe.
‘Did you see the way she looked at me, the slanty-eyed bitch? She was dying for it. The Japs and the Chinks, the women are built different. The hole’s the other way around.’
Around that time Will started to go into Foster Newell’s. Pretending not to look at the lingerie section. The wire-framed brassiere displays. The synthetic legs with tights rolled on, and the breathy vocabularies of the underthings. Flesh-coloured, opaque. Sneaking looks at the seamed nylon and at the women with their heads bowed on the front of the cellophane-wrapped packs. All the secret fastenings, the hooks and buttons and poppers. The gathered-in lore of dress.
‘He came right up to the make-up counter to talk to me,’ Pearl told Ronnie. ‘I didn’t know what way to look. All the other assistants were sniggering. I was afraid the manager would come.’
Will asked Pearl about the make-up. She wasn’t sure if he was making fun of her. He asked her about the brushes and compacts. How the make-up went on and what it was for. Putting the foundation on and building on it, the artifice involved.
‘Please go away,’ she said, ‘this counter is ladies only.’
‘It’s a free country,’ Will said.
So Will watched her from a distance. She was painting a young woman’s nails, the two women’s heads bent over the counter in an intent companionable way, as though they had something of goodwill to share between them. When Pearl wasn’t looking he put a bottle of Rimmel nail varnish and several lipsticks in his pocket. It was something he had been in the habit of doing. He shoplifted things and then gave them to Robert. He liked the sense of outlaw largesse that it gave him.
‘She give me loads of stuff,’ Will said. ‘She said she’d meet me down on the towpath some night.’
Robert gave the lipstick and nail varnish to Mervyn.
‘You could use them in the train layouts,’ he said. ‘If you want to do something in pink.’
‘I seen a brave many trains,’ Mervyn said, ‘but I never seen a pink one.’
Later that year Robert had gone to England, taking the mail boat from Warrenpoint to Liverpool.
‘He had this thing about going to England,’ Will said afterwards, ‘he was always going on about it, saying you could make it big over there.’ Robert had cut out pictures from Bodybuilder International of the world championships in Earls Court and stuck them on his wall. He imagined himself on the stage with Charles Atlas and other world-champion bodybuilders. Rows of men with muscles bunched and oiled, a fellowship with shared memories of pre-dawn gyms, working with the weights and bar-bells, doing the chin-ups and squats, all the grind you needed to do to add to the tissue mass, hearing the sound of the Earls Court crowd in your ears. Robert could see himself in the high-cut trunks, getting admiring glances from the other competitors. He told Mervyn he would bring him over to act as his trainer so that he could stand in the wings, looking grave with all the other sage elders of the bodybuilding business.
‘Watch what gyms you go to,’ Mervyn told him. ‘It’s not just about putting on muscle. Any fool can do that. It’s about the tone. You have to get up on the balls of your feet, be supple. Forget all this stuff with calipers and measuring. You win a bodybuilding contest in here,’ Mervyn said, tapping the middle of his forehead. ‘You don’t want them to see your big pecs or your big girly clenched arse. You want them to see your heart.’
Mervyn lent Robert £20 for the boat fare from Warrenpoint to Liverpool. Robert took the night mail train from Liverpool to London. He sent a postcard from London showing Big Ben with a red Routemaster bus in the foreground. Mervyn had given him the addresses of several boarding houses on the Holloway Road. ‘It’s like Canal Street!’ Robert wrote home to Mervyn. There was the smell of drains. There were Hasidic Jews on the street, men in skullcaps and turbans. But there were the same smoky gothics of Canal Street, the feeling of having been stranded in some turreted Eastern European capital. It made you think of graveyards and things coming at you out of wreathing mists.
There were several Russians staying in the boarding house. They were small men with moustaches. Robert had never come across people like them before. Gloomy, heavy-accented, semi-alcoholic. They went out in the evening and returned late at night. Robert could hear their footsteps going past outside his room, their heavy, dragging gait weighed down with Slavic woes. They spent the daytime in their rooms with the curtains drawn.
Mrs Pieloski, the landlady, was a small thin woman who smoked Embassy Reds. There were cigarette coupons and Green Shield stamps in the vase in the kitchen. She had been brought up on Marrowbone Lane and spoke in a street trader’s guttural, a spat-out Whitechapel cant.
‘Them Russkies is up to no good. Them and their fucking bomb. Spies is what I think.’
Robert started off working for tips as a busboy, barely able to afford his rent. He was subject to all the sensations of the city newcomer, the crushing anonymity, the gaping stance in public places. When he had no money he would ride the tube. He liked being underneath the city, seeing the exposed pipes and brickwork, feeling himself among the workings of the city, the tunnelled-out doings of the place. He liked it when the carriages built up speed, careening through the dark, blue flashes thrown up from the rail, a sense of unseen forces at work.
Robert worked hard on sounding as if he belonged. Picking up the Greek Street patois. He started talking about toms and ponces.
The London papers were full of spy cases. George Blake. The M21 Lonsdale spying case. Robert saw himself as undercover in Soho, felt the night around him alive with plotters, stealthy figures with Eastern European accents.
Robert got a job as a waiter in a restaurant on Berwick Street. The owner of the restaurant was a Frenchman. He had a board behind the till where he had pinned kitchen chits, each with a lipstick imprint of a woman’s mouth on it and a signature underneath.
The owner would get the girls to do a lip imprint on a chit for him, then he would buy them a drink. Between shifts Robert would stand at the back door to take in the air. Couples would go into the alley behind the restaurant. You could barely see them in the dark, men and women labouring in the shadows. In the morning there would be used condoms on the ground.
The restaurant was popular with minor showbusiness figures who worked in the theatres on Shaftesbury Avenue. It was also frequented by girls from the Raymond Revuebar where semi-nude shows were performed. The Revuebar was subject to closures and prosecutions under obscenity laws. Robert felt at home with the performers. Many were runaways. There were tales of harsh provincial upbringings, sexual violence in the home. Robert told them he would write their stories of hardship cheerily overcome, of odds defied. He offered them a tale of gritty romance. Something to set against the desolation that assailed them from within.
But at some stage of the night they would let themselves down. They would slip off into the night with one of the male clientele, a night cadre of grifters and ponces.
‘It’s like they want to be treated like dirt,’ Robert said, watching them walk into the night. The other girls would go quiet. For all Robert’s talk, somebody else was writing their story. They recognised the tawdry landmarks of its narrative in each other. The wrong men. The unpaid rents and backstreet abortions. They showed Robert how to hide a bruise or a cut with face powder, how to mask a black eye with a surgical eyepatch so that it looked as if you had been to the doctor. They had convictions for soliciting and shoplifting. They were unreliable, lightfingered, guileful in ways that Robert couldn’t even imagine.
There were shops on Berwick Street which sold Titbits and other titillating magazines over the counter. Once they got to know you other publications were produced from under the counter in brown paper bags. The shop owners leered, hinted at unspeakable depravities. Robert bought several without seeing the contents. The magazines consisted of a series of poor-quality photographs of minor fetishes. Robert also frequented bookshops in the backstreets behind King’s Cross Station, buying books with titles such as Souvenirs from a Boarding School and My Secret Life. It was these materials that were found when the Newry police raided Robert’s house, leading to the rumours that swept the town concerning Robert’s sexual preferences.
The girls who worked in the restaurant saw Robert as prone to unworldliness. They covered up for him when he was late or didn’t hear the bell to pick up orders from the kitchen. He told them that Russian agents had tried to recruit him at a gym on Tottenham Court Road. He hinted at previous employment on secret government programmes. He told them his head was full of dangerous knowledge. He dreamed of U2 spy planes borne aloft, floating through the ionosphere as though they might drift off the edge of the known landmass. He sat through newsreel footage of Cold War flare-ups, Soviet divisions massing. He immersed himself in the literature of moles and infiltrators.
Robert didn’t work Mondays and Tuesdays. He would take the train into the countryside to see the spy station at Menwith Hill, the tracking complexes. But it was the nuclear missiles that drew him, the bunkers and silos. Their silvered, enthralling fuselages inching from bases in the United States. He imagined them tracked into the atmosphere, the parabolic flightpaths aimed towards the Soviet centres of populations, the secret tundra cities.
He took the train to Greenham Common and stole a bicycle from the train station. He cycled around the outside of the base, watching the B52s take off and land, the afterburn roar as they lifted slowly into the air. He made the trip several times. The second time he was arrested by members of the Military Police and taken to Greenham police station where he was questioned before being released. A Minolta camera and a spiral reporter’s notebook where he had recorded the take-off and landing times of B52 flights were confiscated.
It is not known whether Robert’s detention and trial on capital murder charges became known to those he had worked with in London. He was featured in several London dailies before his arrest, but the working population of Soho was transient. People drifted on without leaving forwarding addresses. For most of them Soho was something they were glad to leave behind. Its backstreet sex barkers and rip-off clubs and strip joints, its louche camaraderies good for a year or two only.
Robert spent ten months in London but he missed Newry and its gloomy, elegant malls and end-of-the-line mills. He missed the town centre and the empty halls and crumbling mansions of the industrialists on the canal bank. He pictured the town empty like some plague-swept city of olden times with charnel mists drifting in the streets, the seabirds’ lone hootings in the fogbound bents at the head of the lough.
When he got a letter from Mervyn reminding him about his offer of an apprenticeship in shoemaking he went back to Newry.
The first person he met when he got back was Will. Robert was wearing a black drape suit he had bought just before he had left London.
‘I hardly knew you, you big spastic,’ Will said, ‘in that fancy London get-up.’
‘How’s the town?’ Robert said.
‘Town never changes,’ Will said, ‘which is more than can be said for you, you big girl’s blouse.’