CHOKING ON A TUNE

Whatever his big sister had implied across the years, or had indeed at one point written on his forehead using magic marker while he was asleep, Mick Warren wasn’t stupid. If there’d been a hazard label on the drum, perhaps a yellow death’s-head or a screaming stick-man with his face burned off, then Mick would almost certainly have realized that hitting it quite hard with an enormous fuckoff sledgehammer was not the best idea he’d ever had.

But for some reason there’d been no fluorescent stickers, no white government advisory, not even the insipid kind that warned against skin aging or low birth weight. Mick had blithely hefted the great hammer back just over his right shoulder and then swung it down through its familiar and exhilarating arc. The satisfying clang when it connected, ringing off into the windswept corners of St. Martin’s Yard, was only marred by his own startled bellow as the whole front of Mick’s head, which he had always thought of as his better side, was sandblasted by poison dust.

His cheeks and brow had instantly been blistered into bubble-wrap. Dropping the weighty hammer, Mick had tried to run off from the toxic cloud his mystery drum had just exhaled as if it were a swarm of bees, swatting his hands around his face and roaring angrily, not “squealing like a girl” as one close relative had later claimed. The relative in question, anyway, had got no cause to talk. At least he’d only looked the way he had for several days as a result of an industrial accident, whereas she’d looked that way since birth and had no such excuse.

Blinded and howling, this according to the subsequent colorful witness statements of fellow employes, Mick had charged round in a semicircle and, with all the slapstick timing of a radiation-scarred post-nuclear Harold Lloyd, had run head first into a bar of steel protruding from the outsize scales on which the flattened drums were weighed. He’d knocked himself out cold, and looking back congratulated himself on the speed with which, in trying circumstances, he had improvised a painkiller that was both total and immediate in its effect. Hardly the actions of a stupid man, he’d smugly reassured himself after a day or two, by which time the worst bruises weren’t so bad.

He must have only lay sprawled on his back there in the dirt unconscious for a second before Howard, his best mate down at the reconditioning yard, caught on to what was happening and had rushed to Mick’s assistance. He’d turned on the tap that fed the business’s one hosepipe, training the resultant jet into Mick’s comatose and upturned face, sluicing away the caustic orange powder covering the blistered features like a minstrel make-up meant only for radio. From what Howard reported afterwards, Mick had come round at once, his bloodshot eyes opening on a look of absolute confusion. He’d apparently been mumbling something with great urgency as he recovered consciousness, but far too softly for his concerned workmate to make out more than a word or two of what he’d said. Something about a chimney or perhaps a chimp that was in some way getting bigger, but then Mick had seemed to suddenly remember where he was and also that his blistered and rust-dusted face was now an agonizing bowl of Coco Pops. He’d started hollering again, and after Howard had washed off the worst of the contamination with his hose he’d got permission from the anxious management to drive Mick over Spencer Bridge, up Crane Hill, Grafton Street and Regent Square, across the Mounts, then take a complicated set of turns to Billing Road to Cliftonville, this being where the casualty department of the hospital was now. Despite the fact that Mick had spent the whole duration of this journey swearing forcefully into the wet towel that he’d held pressed to his face, something about the route they’d taken had felt queasily familiar.

He’d been lucky, happening to hit a quiet patch at the hospital, and had been treated straight away, not that there was a lot that they could do. They’d cleaned him up and put drops in his eyes, told him his eyesight should be back to normal the next day, his face within a week, then Howard ran him home. All the way there Mick had gazed silently from the car window at the blur of Barrack Road and Kingsthorpe through his swollen, leaking eyelids and had wondered why he felt a sense of creeping and insidious dread. They’d given him the all-clear down at casualty. It wasn’t like he had to fret about the accident’s long-term effects, and with the few days of paid sick leave that he’d get off work from this you could say he’d come out on top. Why did he feel, then, as if some great cloud of doom was hanging over him? It must have been the shock, he’d finally concluded. Shock could do some funny things. It was a well-known fact.

Howard had dropped him off in the pull-over spot down at the foot of Chalcombe Road, barely a minute’s walk from Mick and Cathy’s house. Mick said goodbye and thanked his colleague for the ride then mounted the short lane that led to his back gate. The rear yard, with its patio and decking and the shed he’d built himself was reassuring in its tidiness after the chaos and confusion of his day thus far, even seen through the bleary filter of his current puddle-vision. The interior with its gleaming kitchen and neat living room was every bit as orderly and comforting, and with Cath off at work and both the boys at school he had it to himself. Mick made himself a cup of tea and sank into the sofa, lighting up a fag, uneasily aware of the precarious normality of everything.

Although Mick did his fair share of the work, the driving force behind the pristine smartness of their home was Cathy. This was not to say that Mick’s wife was obsessed with cleanliness and order. It was more that Cathy had a deep aversion to untidiness and grime and what they represented to her, a conditioning instilled by having grown up in the Devlin family den. He understood that what to him might seem a barely-noticeable minor carpet stain, to Cathy was a crack in the high wall she’d built between her present and her past, between their current comfortable domestic life and Cathy’s not particularly happy childhood. Children’s toys left scattered on the rug, if not picked up at once, could mean that the next time she looked there’d be her late dad and a gang of drunken uncles sprawled about the place, what looked like a scrap metal business opening in the back yard, and more policemen coming to the door than milkmen. This fear wasn’t rational, they both knew that, but Mick could see how growing up a Devlin could impress it on a person.

Mick got on with all his in-laws, very well with some of them, and thought that by and large they were a lovely crowd, at least the ones he knew. Cath’s sister Dawn, for instance, was a social worker down in Devon, where Mick and the family had taken lots of holidays as a result. Dawn’s youngest daughter Harriet, at the tender age of four, had said about the funniest thing that Mick had ever heard from any child or adult when her dad had asked her if she knew why crabs walked sideways and she’d moodily replied, “Because they’re assholes.” Perhaps because there were a lot of similarities in background with the Warren family, Mick had always felt very comfortable about being related to the Devlins.

Mind you, they were still the Devlins. Bulletins through Cathy from the wilder reaches of the massively extended clan still had the power to startle or alarm. There’d been a funeral some weeks before that Mick had not been able to attend thanks to his work. Cathy had gone, and it had been by all accounts the spirited affair that Devlin funerals usually turned out to be. At one point in the service, Cathy’s sister Dawn had nudged her and said, “Have you seen our Chris?” This was a distant cousin Cathy had already spotted, standing in the crowd towards the chapel’s rear, and so she said that, yes, she’d seen him. Dawn, though, had persisted. “No, but have you seen him? Have you seen the chap that he’s got with him?” Cathy had glanced back across her shoulder and there stood her cousin, next to someone just as tall as he was who seemed to be struggling to control his feelings at the sad occasion. It was only later, at the wake, that Cath had realized why he’d been standing so close to Cousin Chris. The two of them were handcuffed to each other. The emotionally overwrought man, who’d embarrassed everybody at the do by going on about how wonderful the Devlin family were and just how much he’d been moved by the ceremony, was the plain-clothes prison officer responsible for supervising Chris’s day release. Armed robbery, apparently.

Mick’s wife’s kin were a colorful and various bunch grown from the same black, soot-fed Boroughs earth as were the Warrens. No doubt this was why Cath wouldn’t tolerate that self-same native soil if it got tracked across her fitted carpets. The pastel walls and polished dining table were a barrier against the mud that hung in clumps round Cathy’s roots, but Mick enjoyed the neatness, the predictable serenity. The only problem with it at the moment came when Mick caught sight of his reflection in the glass doors of the cabinet. Sat there with his erupting face sipping his tea among the decorous furnishings he looked like something from a George Romero film, a wistful zombie trying to remember how the living did things.

This stray thought brought with it the return of Mick’s unfocused, inexplicable anxieties from earlier. He still didn’t know where they were coming from. Had something happened in his head while he was out? A stroke or something, or perhaps he’d had one of those dreams that you can’t quite remember but which leave a nasty atmosphere all day. What had been going through his mind in those first seconds when he came round flat out in St. Martin’s Yard, babbling nonsense with volcanoes in his eyes? What had his first thought been upon awakening?

With a lurch he realized that it had been, simply, ‘Mom’.

His mother, Doreen Warren who’d been Doreen Swan, had died ten years before in 1995 and Mick still thought about her fondly almost every day, still missed her. But he missed her as an adult misses people, and he didn’t think about her with the tone of mental voice he’d heard in his first thought upon recovering consciousness. That had been like a lost child calling for its mother, and he hadn’t felt like that since …

Since he’d woken up in hospital when he was three.

Oh God. Mick stood up from the sofa, then sat down again, unsure of why he’d risen in the first place. Was that what this simmering unease was all about, a chance event of no lasting importance that had happened more than forty years ago? He stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray that he’d brought through from the kitchen then stood up again, this time to crack a window open and allow the smoke time to disperse before the kids and Cathy came home from their days at school and work. This task accomplished he sat down and then stood up again, and then sat down. Shit. What was wrong with him?

He could remember what it had been like when he was three, opening up his eyes to gray ward walls and the pervasive smell of disinfectant, having no idea of where he was or how he’d got there. He’d been forced to put the missing incident together one piece at a time from scraps of information that he’d wormed out of his mom over the next few days, how they’d been sitting in the back yard when a sweet had got itself stuck in Mick’s throat so that he couldn’t breathe, and how the man who lived next door to them along St. Andrew’s Road had driven Mick all limp and lifeless to the hospital, where they’d unblocked his windpipe, taken out his swollen tonsils for good measure and returned him to his family as good as new by the weekend. He knew, then, what had happened to him but he only knew it second hand. When he’d first woken up with a strange nurse and doctor looming in above him he’d had no recall of anything from earlier that day at all, not sitting in the garden on his mother’s knee, not choking and not being rushed to hospital. For all he’d known, the bleak and pungent ward with all the Mabel Lucie Attwell posters tin-tacked to its walls might have been his first moment of existence.

That, though, had been then. This time, on waking from his accident at work, there’d been a moment when Mick’s mind was far from blank; a moment in which Mick had suddenly remembered quite a lot. The problem was that in those first few panicked seconds of recovered consciousness, his sudden rush of memories had not been those belonging to a forty-nine-year-old. He hadn’t even known that was his age, had not straight away understood what he was doing in this open yard with steel drums everywhere. He hadn’t thought immediately of Cathy, or the kids, or of the many other reference points to which, in normal circumstances, he had anchored his identity. It was, in those befuddled instants, just as if the last four-decades-plus-change of his life had never happened. It was as though he were once again a three-year-old awakening in 1959 down at the General Hospital, except this time he’d been a three-year-old who could remember what had happened to him.

All the details of the incident in the back garden that had been wiped from his memory as a child had, after more than forty years, been given back. Granted, they’d been returned in a compressed and jumbled form that mainly manifested as a vague uneasy feeling, but if Mick just sat and thought it through he felt convinced that he’d be able to untangle it, to pick this sense of being haunted that he had apart like so much yarn. He closed his eyes, as much to stop them stinging as to aid his reverie. He saw the yard, saw the old stable that was visible across a five-foot-high back wall, its roof with the black gaps where slates were missing like a crossword puzzle blank. The sofa’s cushions underneath him were Doreen’s lap, and its hard and bony wooden edge her knees. He sank into the warm ancestral dough without the slightest difficulty or resistance as the spacious living room surrounding him contracted to a narrow brick enclosure, with the backsides of the terraced houses rising up to right and left, a ragged patch of washed-out blue sky overhead.

The Boroughs had been an entirely different place back then, that smelled and looked and sounded nothing like the abattoir of hope and joy it was today. Admittedly, the odor of the neighborhood had been much worse in those days, or at least in the most literal and obvious sense. There’d been a tannery just north along St. Andrew’s Road, with great mounds of mysterious turquoise shavings piled up in its yard and a sharp chemical aroma like carcinogenic pear drops. This came from the noxious blue substance painted on the sheepskins to burn out all the hair follicles and make the wool coats that much easier to pull, and wasn’t half as bad as the smell coming from the south, which issued from a rendering plant, a glue factory on St. Peter’s Way. The west wind brought a perfume of scorched engine oil blown from the railway with an iron aftertaste of anthracite from the coal merchants, Wiggins, just across the road, while from the opposite direction when the dawn sun rose above the stable’s leaking rooftop it would lift the rich scents from the Boroughs’ streets themselves, wafting them downhill from the east in an olfactory avalanche: the steamy human essence piping from a hundred copper boilers, good food, bad food, dog food and dog carcasses, brick dust and wild flowers, rancid drains and someone’s chimneypot on fire. Hot tar in summer, the astringent smell of frosty grass in winter, all of this and then the River Nene on top, its cold and green bouquet drifting from Paddy’s Meadow just along the way. These days the Boroughs had no distinct fragrance that the nose could ascertain, and yet in the imagined cilia of the heart it reeked.

As for St. Andrew’s Road itself, or at least as far as their little strip of it had been concerned, that was just gone, replaced by a grass verge that harbored a few trees and the odd ornamental shopping trolley, stretched between the foot of Spring Lane and the foot of Scarletwell. There’d been twelve houses there, two or three businesses, God knows how many people on a plot that now seemed to be the sole province of the upturned mobile birdcages, the cold and hard providers of three generations’ packaged sustenance sprawling there in the weeds like obsolete wire mummies that the lab chimps had at last lost interest in.

Sitting there on the sofa in his Kingsthorpe living room he let his mind trickle away down vanished conduits and lost lanes to soak into the past. He saw the narrow jitty that ran parallel with Andrew’s Road, up past the back yards of the row, a solitary disused gas lamp halfway down its length. For some years after all the houses were demolished you could still make out the cobbles of the obsolete back alley as they bulged up through the turf; the sawn-through base of the old lamp standard, a ragged-edged iron ring inside which the cross-section bores of smaller wires and pipes had still been visible, the neck-stump of a buried and decapitated robot. This was gone now, swallowed by the grass, or by the bulging fence that ran along the bottom of Spring Lane School’s playing field, this boundary having crawled a little to the west within the thirty years or so since his home street had been pulled down and its inhabitants strewn to the wind. There was nobody left who could object or halt the playing field’s encroachment. In another twenty years Mick thought the wandering chain link barrier might have got down to Andrew’s Road itself, where it would have to wait beside the curb for a few centuries before it crossed.

The road, named after the St. Andrew’s Priory that had stood along its northern, Semilong end long before, had once been the town’s western boundary. This was in the twelve-hundreds, when the area called the Boroughs now was then Northampton, all there was of it. The locals and the Bachelerie di Northampton – the notoriously radical and monarch-baiting student population of the town – had sided with Simon de Montfort and his rebel barons against King Henry the Third and the four dozen wealthy burgesses who had been governing the place for fifty years since Magna Carta, creaming off its profits, and were forerunners of the still forty-eight-strong council that was running things today, in 2005. Back then in the 1260s, an irate King Henry had sent out a force of soldiers to quell the revolt with extreme prejudice. The prior of St. Andrew’s, being of the Cluniac order and thus being French, had sided with the Norman royal family and let the King’s men enter through a gap within the priory wall, probably more or less across the street from where the Warrens’ house had later stood. The troops had sacked and burned the previously prosperous and pleasant town, while in reaction to the rabble-rousing students it had been decided that it would be Cambridge that became a seat of learning, rather than Northampton. As Mick saw things, that was where the punishment and disenfranchisement of his home turf had started, kicking off a process that continued to the present day. Refuse just once to eat the shit that you’ve been served up and the powers that be will make sure there’s a double helping steaming on your plate at every supper for the next eight hundred years.

That day in 1959 the district had been spread out like a musty blanket on the summer, stalks of bleaching grass poked through its threadbare weave. The factories clanged at intervals or sprayed acetylene sparks in brief, shearing arcs behind smoked Perspex windows. Martins chattered in the baking eaves to either side of tilting streets where women in checked headscarves trotted stoically along beneath their panniers of shopping; where old men at ten past three were still attempting to get home, dizzy with dominoes, from their quick lunchtime half down at the Sportsman’s Arms. The school uphill across the yellowed playing field, deserted for the holidays, was deafeningly silent with the non-shrieks of two hundred absent children. It had been a harmless, pleasant afternoon. The tower blocks hadn’t been erected yet. The sand-blond film of demolition dust coating the neighborhood evoked only the season and the beach.

The whole front of the terraced house had been deserted, Mick’s dad Tommy being off at work over the brewery in Earl’s Barton and the other family members out in the back yard taking advantage of the weather. From the smooth-worn pavement of St. Andrew’s Road, three steps led up into the alcove cowling the tired red of their front door, a black iron boot-scrape, which Mick hadn’t fathomed the intended function of until he was approximately ten, set back into the wall beside the bottom doorstep. To the door’s right, as seen by a visitor, there was the framed wire grid at pavement level ventilating the pitch-dark coal cellar, and above that was the front room window with the china swan gazing disconsolately out at Wiggins’s yard, the rust-and-bindweed railway sidings stretched beyond and the occasional passing car. Left of the front door was a mutual drainpipe and then the front door and windows of Mrs. McGeary’s house, which had a frayed and peeling wooden gate beside it giving access to the cobbled yard and the dilapidated stables at the rear.

Once up the steps and inside number seventeen, there was the plain coconut doormat and the passageway, with ghostly ocher flowers fading into oblivion on its wallpaper and a flypaper-colored light falling upon its worsted-burdened coat pegs. The first door upon the right led to the then-evacuated front room with its ponderous grandfather clock, its horsehair settee and its easy chair, its paraffin stove and its polished cabinet of fancy crockery that no one ever used, its table mat-sized rented television with a cabinet-style set of doors that closed across the screen. The second offshoot from the passage led into the similarly empty living room, while straight in front of you the stairs rose to the upper floor, carpeted with a writhing brown design that looked like catkins made from Christmas pudding. The top story of the old house had got his and Alma’s room towards the rear up at the stairway’s top, then up one sideways step onto the landing where their gran’s room likewise overlooked the narrow L-shape of the semi-tiled back yard, with Tom and Doreen’s room, the biggest in the house, being along the landing’s end, its windows overlooking Andrew’s Road above the ones downstairs with the resigned white china swan. This upper level, being mostly uninhabited by day, he’d thought of as his home’s night-story, lending it a slightly sinister and creepy air. Whenever he’d had childhood nightmares that had used his own house as their set, the scariest bits had always taken place upstairs.

The ground floor was too cozy to be frightening, despite the shadows in the generally sunless kitchen and those in the living room, just off the gloomy hall. Here space was at a premium, occupied by the drop-wing dining table with two matching seats, a stool and rugged wood chair making up the set. Two comfy armchairs (one of which Mick’s cousin John had fallen back out through the window from years earlier) flanked the meteoric-looking iron fireplace (into which John’s sister Eileen had plunged face first at around the same time), with the tiny room also accommodating the large junk-sarcophagus that was the sideboard. A stepped plaster beading, once presumably intended to be decorative, ran round the edges of the ceiling and conspired to make the roof seem even lower than it did already. Hanging from the picture rail of the wall opposite the hearth were washed-out portrait photographs in heavy frames, beige and white images depicting men with knowing grins and bright eyes gazing from beneath the thickets of their brows: Mick’s great-grandfather William Mallard, and his gran’s late husband, Mick’s maternal grandfather Joe Swan with the mustache that appeared wider than his shoulders. There was a third picture also, of another man, but Mick had never bothered asking who it was and nobody had ever bothered telling him. Instead, he called to mind the face of the anonymous chap in the picture as a stand-in if somebody mentioned a dead relative he hadn’t known. One week the man might be Gran’s brother, Uncle Cecil, and the next he could be Cousin Bernard, drowned during the war whilst trying to rescue others from a sinking battleship. For a bewildering fortnight he’d been Neville Chamberlain before Mick had worked out that the Hitler-appeasing former premier wasn’t a close relative.

Cut into the dividing wall between the front and living rooms there was a recess which contained a single panel of stained glass, a floral emblem in bright yellow, emerald green, and red like ruby port. Some evenings around teatime, when the sun was going down behind the railway yards across St. Andrew’s Road, an almost-horizontal shaft would strike in through the parlor window, glance across the dipped head of the china swan and blaze through the connecting pane of colored glass into the dim-lit living room to splash its marvelous and trembling patch of phantom paint upon the bland-faced wireless, wall-mounted between the back-yard window and the kitchen door.

The poky kitchen with its white distempered walls and chilly blue and red slabs making up its floor was down a short step from the living room. Descending this, you had the cellar door on your immediate left, a rusted meat-safe stood behind it there atop the cellar stairs. Upon your right was the back door which led out to the top half of the yard, with just beyond a coarse stone sink sporting a single brass cold-water tap, inlaid with verdigris, beneath a solitary window. Opposite had stood the gas-stove, the old woodworm-riddled kitchen table and the treacherous mangle, and above them, from a nail, had hung the one-size-fits-all zinc bath that the family used for its various ablutions. When required this would be half-filled with hot water from the copper boiler, a gunmetal-colored cylinder pimpled with condensation at the room’s far end, next to the boarded-up and unused kitchen fireplace. Mick remembered the short wooden pole that would be propped beside the copper for the purposes of stirring up the simmering laundry, one end waterlogged and blunted by perpetual use, its grain and fibers turned to corpse-pale slime and given a cyanic tinge by the deployment of excessive Reckitt’s Blue, a small cloth bag of sapphire dye dropped in among the washing to ensure that shirts and sheets looked iceberg-white. He could remember shelves that weren’t much more than grubby planks on brackets, bowing with the weight of saucepans, iron frying pans, the pudding basin that contained a cloudy amber puddle of solidifying dripping in its rounded depths with their mosaic craquelure.

Upon the day in question, Mick’s gran Clara had been working quietly and methodically out in the kitchen, juggling several tasks at once the way that she’d been taught to when she worked in service. Clara Swan, who’d died not far into the 1970s, would have been in her early sixties then, but to her grandchildren had always seemed as ancient and authoritative as a biblical papyrus. What she lacked in height she made up for in bearing, upright to the point where no one noticed that she wasn’t tall. She stood straight like an ivory chesspiece, scuffed by years of tournaments; was as impassive and as patient and as purposeful. Always a spare and slender woman in her iron-eyed youthful photographs, by 1959 she’d been more stick-like, the long silver hair that hung below her waist bound up in a neat bun. The broomstick spine topped with gray wool gave her the aura of a mop, if mops were seen as things of simple dignity, as endlessly reliable in their utility, were as revered as scepters and not treated as a lowly household object found most often in the kitchen.

Number seventeen was Clara’s house, with her name on the rent-book, and she ruled it unobtrusively. She never laid the law down and she didn’t need to. Everybody knew already where her lines were drawn, and wouldn’t dream of crossing them. Her power was a less obvious and ultimately more impressive kind than that wielded by May, Mick’s naan, his other grandmother. May Warren had been an intimidating rhino of a woman who would get her way through warning growls and threatened slaps and what in general was a bullying demeanor. Whip-thin Clara Swan, by contrast, never raised her voice, and never threatened. She just acted, swiftly and efficiently. When Alma at the age of two, already more foolhardy and impetuous than anybody else within the household, had decided to try biting Clara, Mick’s grandmother hadn’t shouted or announced a smacking. She’d just bitten Alma’s shoulder, hard enough to pierce the skin and hard enough to ensure that Mick’s sister never, ever tried again to kill someone by eating them. If only, he reflected, she’d cured Alma of the strangling as well. Or the attempts with poison gas, as when Alma persuaded her young brother to stay with her in the kitchen while she lit a mustard-yellow shard of sulfur. Or her pygmy headhunter approach, like when she’d shot him with that blowpipe dart. No, really. Mick supposed, in fairness, that even his granny’s methods of behavior modification had their limits. Clara had been in the kitchen on that drowsy afternoon, been shredding suet, baking a bread pudding, boiling handkerchiefs and shuffling back and forth from one task to another uncomplainingly, alone there with the aromatic bogey broth. The badly-fitting back door, hanging open on this fine day to air out the house, allowed the chat and babble of her daughter Doreen and the children to come floating in to Clara from where they’d been sitting just outside, on the slim draughtboard strip of cracked pink and blue tiles that formed the upper level of the house’s cramped back garden.

Sitting now in his still, relatively spacious Kingsthorpe parlor, stinging from his honorably-withdrawing-not-retreating hairline to his dimpled chin, he tried to reconcile the cluttered confines of his childhood with the streamlined TV Century 21 surroundings of his current middle-age. Mick looked once more at the reflection of his raw face in the glass front of the cabinet, deciding on the strength of his disaster-struck complexion that he must be Captain Scarlet. He tried fitting the mostly contented adult he’d become with the unspeakably contented three-year-old he’d been and found that the connection was surprisingly smooth and continuous, Mick’s recollection of his young self neither clouded by unhappiness nor tainted by that sorry wistfulness he sometimes heard in others’ voices when they talked about their boyhood days. Life had been good then, life was good now. It was just that life was different, in that it was being seen through different eyes, being experienced by a different person, almost.

The most striking thing about the past, at least as Mick remembered it, was not the obvious difference in how people dressed, or what they did, or the technology they did it with. It was something more difficult to grasp or put a name to, that by turn delightful and unsettling sense of strangeness that came over him on handling forgotten photographs, or suddenly recalling some particularly vivid reminiscence. It would come to him as the weak flavor of a fleeting atmosphere, an unrecoverable mood, as singular and as specific to its place and time as the day’s weather or the shapes its clouds made, just that once, never to be repeated. He supposed that the peculiar quality that he attempted to describe was no more than the startling texture of the past, the way it might feel should you brush your memory’s fingertips across its nap. It was the grain of his experience, composed from an uncountable array of unique whorls and bumps, from almost indiscernibly protruding detail. The string netting of the decomposing dishcloth hung by the back door, stiffened and dried into a permanently tented elbow shape, perfumed by dirty water and warm ham. The finger-sized holes in the blocks that edged Gran’s yard-wide flowerbed, beside the faded red and blue check of the path. A secret ant-nest gnawed into the crumbling cement between two courses of the kitchen wall, beside the steps that led down to a lower level of their closed-in yard. That afternoon there’d been the smell of sun-baked brick, black soil, the tinny scent of recent rain.

Now that he thought about it, not without a faint vestigial flicker of resentment, the entire life-threatening incident that had occurred in the back yard that day had been as a direct result of being poor. If he’d not been one of the offspring of the Boroughs then he wouldn’t have been sitting on his mother’s lap in the sunlit back yard sucking the nearly-lethal cough-drop in the first place.

Mick – or Michael as he’d been then – had been suffering from an inflamed gullet for about a week before that point. When Doreen’s homemade remedy of butter-knobs that had been rolled in caster sugar failed to work, she’d wrapped him up and taken him down Broad Street, off the Mayorhold, to the surgery of Dr. Gray. Though neither Mick nor any of his family had thought about it then, he understood now that the doctors who had tended to his neighborhood must have resented every minute of their unrewarded, undistinguished toil in ministering to such a lowly and benighted area. They’d almost certainly be working harder than their more illustrious colleagues, just by virtue of the Boroughs being what it was and having more ways people could get ill. They must have come to hate the sight of all those over-anxious mothers wearing toffee-colored coats and tea-towel scarves, parading half-baked snot-nosed children through their practices at the first sneeze. It must have been all they could do to feign an interest in the wheezing brat for the five minutes that it would be in their office. That was clearly the approach that Dr. Gray had taken with Doreen and Mick that time. He’d shone a torch down Michael’s carmine and inflated gullet, grunted once and made his diagnosis.

“It’s a sore throat. Give him cough-sweets.”

Mick’s mom would have no doubt nodded gravely and compliantly. This was a doctor speaking, who’d had training and could write in Latin. This was someone who, by just a glance at the small child she’d brought in with a poorly throat in which it was experiencing soreness, had seen straight away that this was a near-textbook case of Sore Throat that required immediate intervention from a bag of Winter Mixture. Nineteen-fifties social medicine: it must have seemed a step up from the days when laryngitis would be driven out by exorcism. Mick and Alma’s parents had been grateful for it, anyway, and Doreen would have thanked the general practitioner for his advice with touching earnestness before she’d wrestled Mick into his duffle-coat and carried him back down St. Andrew’s Road, possibly stopping off at the newsagent, Botterill’s on the Mayorhold, to buy the medicinal confectionery that had been prescribed.

And that was how he’d come to be in their back yard, in his pajamas and his scratchy tartan dressing gown, squirming on Doreen’s lap while she perched on the curve-backed wooden chair brought out into the garden from the living room. His mom sat just beneath the kitchen window with her back to it, the rear legs of her seat against the edging of the kitchen drain, a foot or so of gutter running from below the window to a sunken trap close by the ant-nest, hidden near the garden’s three rough steps. The kingdom of the ants had been the property of Mick’s big sister, and, as she’d explained it to him at the time, was hers by legal right of being eldest child. When she was playing Sodom and Gomorrah with the insects, though, to give Alma her due, she’d let Mick be a kind of work-experience avenging angel to her merciless Jehovah. He’d been put in charge of rounding up escapees from the Cities on the Plain, until Alma had fired him for preventing one of his six-legged charges running off by hitting it with half a brick. His sister, who’d been at that moment either drowning or incinerating ants herself, had turned upon him with a look of outrage.

“What did you do that for?”

Little Mick had blinked up at her guilelessly. “It kept escaping, so I stunned it.”

Alma, half-blind even then, had squinted at the ant in question, which had lost a whole dimension, and then squinted at her brother in appalled incomprehension before stamping off to play alone indoors.

Alma had been at home that afternoon by virtue of it being the school holidays, probably wishing she could be out in the park or meadow rather than stuck there in the back garden with her mom and useless croaking bundle of a baby brother. While Doreen and Mick had sat there on the upper strip of path, Mick’s elder sister, then a tubby five- or six-year-old, had batted energetically around the yard’s brick confines like a moth trapped in a shoebox. She’d run up and down the garden’s three stone steps a dozen times, her white knees pumping back and forth like juggled dumplings, then raced in a circle round the nine-foot-by-nine-foot enclosure, half brick paving, half compressed black dirt, that was the bottom of the garden. She’d hidden from nobody in particular, twice in their outside toilet and once in the narrow rectangle of dead-end concrete alleyway that ran along its side, the left-hand side if you were sitting on the bowl and facing out.

That little shed with its slate roof – their outdoor lavatory down at the bottom of the yard without a cistern or electric light – had been most notable to Mick among the Warren family’s various anti-status-symbols. Their back toilet, he had realized at the age of six or so, was an embarrassment even within a neighborhood not known for its amenities. Even their naan, who lived on Green Street in a gas-lit house that had no electricity at all, at least she had a cistern in her lav. Trips to the loo after the sun went down didn’t require a stuttering Wee Willy Winkie candle or a big tin bucket filled near to its brim with water from the kitchen tap, the way they did along St. Andrew’s Road.

As a small child, he’d hated their outside lav after dark and wouldn’t use it, far preferring either just to hold it in or else use the pink plastic chamber pot stuck under his and Alma’s bed. For one thing, he’d been slightly built back then, rather than a great hulking lummox like his sister. Whereas she could confidently clomp off down the garden path with a huge sloshing bucket in one hand and flickering night-light in the other, he could barely lift the bucket using both his hands; would only have been able to affect a comic stagger as far as the garden steps before he’d spilled the ice-cold water down his leg and/or set his blond curls alight with the incautious flailings of his candle.

Anyway, even if somehow back then in his larval cherub stage he could have managed to successfully transport the heavy pail, their yard by night was altered, unknown territory, too eerie to negotiate alone. The gap-toothed stable roof across the bottom wall was a mysterious slope of silver slate where rustling night-birds came and went through the black apertures. Its gray, ramshackle incline with the dandelions and wallflowers struggling from between its cracks was a steep ramp that led up into night. The tiny five-by-three-foot stretch of alleyway between the toilet and the garden wall was plenty big enough to hold a ghost, a witch and a green Frankenstein, with lots of room left over for those black and spiky imps like charred horse-chestnuts that there used to be in Rupert. Mick had always had the feeling, during childhood, that the back yards of St. Andrew’s Road by night were probably a bustling thoroughfare of ghouls and phantoms, though that may have just been something that his sister told him. Certainly, it had that ring about it.

It had been all very well for Alma. Not only had she been big enough to lift the bucket, but she’d always been much, much too comfortable with the idea of spookiness. It was a quality, he thought, that she had actively aspired to. Nobody could end up like Mick’s sister had unless it was on purpose. He remembered when, aged eight, he’d had a passion for collecting boxed battalions of minuscule Airfix soldiers: British Tommies just two centimeters tall in ocher plastic, ant-sized snipers sprawling on their bellies, others posed on one leg charging with fixed bayonets; or Prussian Infantry in bluish-gray, frozen in mid-throw with their funny rolling-pin grenades. You’d get a dozen soldiers sprouting from each waxy stem, fixed by their heads so that you had to twist them free before you played with them, perhaps five stems in every window-fronted cardboard box. He’d been halfway through an elaborate campaign – French Foreign Legion versus Civil War Confederates – when he’d become aware that both his armies were abnormally depleted. Ruling out desertion, he’d eventually discovered that his elder sister had been stealing soldiers by the handful, taking them down to the outside toilet with her (and her bucket and her candle) when she paid it a nocturnal visit. She’d apparently discovered that if you should light the soldiers’ heads using the candle-flame, then miniature blue fireballs made of blazing polythene would drip spectacularly down into the waiting bucket, making an unearthly vvwip – vvwip – vvwip sound that was terminated in a hiss as the hot plastic met with the cold water. He imagined her, sat there on the cold wooden seat beside the bent nail in the whitewashed wall where scraps of Tit-Bits or Reveille would be hung for use as toilet paper, with her navy knickers round her swinging ankles and her eager face lit indigo in ghastly flashes from beneath as a diminutive centurion was turned into a Roman candle. Was it any wonder that the thought of lurking back-yard specters hadn’t bothered her? The moment that they’d heard her footsteps and the clanking bucket, they’d be off.

On that particular occasion with Mick, aged three, convalescing on his mother’s lap, Doreen had quickly wearied of her eldest child’s stampede around the otherwise agreeable and peaceful yard.

“Ooh, Alma, come and sit dayn ’fore yer make us dizzy. Aya got St. Vitus’ Dance or what?”

Like Mick, his sister generally did as she was told without resistance, but had obviously learned that if she over-did what she was told then it could be a lot more fun than actual disobedience, and was much more difficult to punish or to prove. Obligingly, his sister had skipped up the steps and sat herself down with her legs crossed on the warm and dusty tiles beneath the window of the living room. She beamed up at her mom and ailing baby brother with bright-eyed sincerity.

“Mom, why is Michael croaking?”

“You know why ’e’s croakin’. It’s because ’e’s got a sore throat.”

“Is he turning to a frog?”

“No. I just said, ’e’s got a sore throat. ’Course ’e’s not turnin’ into a frog.”

“If Michael turns into a frog, then can I have him?”

“ ’E’s not turnin’ to a frog.”

“But if he does, then can I keep him in a jam-jar?”

“ ’E’s not … No! No, ’course yer can’t. A jam-jar?”

“Dad could use a screwdriver and punch some air-holes in the lid.”

There’d come a point in any conversation between Alma and their mom in which Doreen would make a huge strategic blunder and would start to argue in the terms of Alma’s logic, whereupon she would immediately be lost.

“You couldn’t keep a frog inside a jam-jar. What’s it s’posed to eat?”

“Grass.”

“Frogs don’t eat grass.”

“Yes they do. That’s why they’re green.”

“Is it? I didn’t know that. Are you sure?”

This was the juncture at which Doreen would compound her previous tactical mistake by doubting her own intellectual capabilities as an adult against those of her infant daughter. Mick’s mom didn’t think that she was very clever or well-educated, and would endlessly defer to anyone whom she suspected might have a more firm grasp of the facts than she herself did. Ruinously, she included Alma in this category for no more reason than that Alma, even at the age of five, pretended to know everything and made her proclamations with such ringing confidence that it was simply easier to go along with her than to resist. Mick could remember how on one occasion, his eight-year-old sister had come home from school demanding beans on toast, a dish she’d heard her classmates mention but which was a new one on Doreen. She’d asked how Alma’s school-friends’ mothers would prepare the meal, at which Mick’s sister had insisted that cold beans were tipped onto a slice of bread, which was then toasted on a fork held to the fireplace. Astonishingly, Doreen had attempted this, purely on Alma’s say-so, and had not thought to employ her own superior judgment until their whole hearth was smothered in baked beans and splashes of tomato sauce with coal dust in suspension. That, or something equally unlikely, was how things turned out whenever anybody took Mick’s sister seriously. He could have told his mom that, back there in the shade and sunlight of the upper yard, if he’d been able to say anything through the balloon of sandpaper that was then steadily inflating in his throat. Instead, he’d shifted on her slippery lap and grizzled slightly, letting her get on with the ridiculous discussion that she’d stumbled into. Alma was now nodding in excitement, backing up her ludicrous assertion.

“Yes! All of the animals that eat grass are turned green. They told us it at school.”

This was a flat lie, but was one which played on Doreen’s insecurities about her own substandard 1930s education. You heard such a lot of marvelous new ideas in 1959 what with the Sputniks and all that, and who knew what astounding and unprecedented facts were being taught in modern classrooms? Decimals and long division, things like that, which Doreen’s own school days had barely touched on. Who was she to say? Perhaps this business with green animals all being fed on grass was something new that people had found out. But still she harbored doubts. It had been Alma, after all, who’d told her that lime cordial poured in boiling milk would make a kind of hot fruit milkshake.

“What about the cows ’n’ ’orses, then? Why ent they green, when they eat grass?”

Unflappable, Alma had waved aside her mother’s hesitant appeal to common sense.

“They are green, some of them. The ones that ent will go green when they’ve eaten enough grass.”

Too late, Mick’s mom had realized she was entering the world of quicksand nonsense that was Alma’s center-parted, pigtailed, butterfly-slide-decorated head. She’d made a feeble yelp of protest as reality gave way beneath her feet.

“I’ve never seen a green cow! Alma, are you making all this up?”

“No” – this in a hurt, reproachful tone of voice. Doreen remained to be convinced.

“Well, then, why ent I seen one? Why ent I seen a green cow or ’orse?”

Alma, sitting beneath the window of the living room, had looked up at their mother levelly, her big gray-yellow eyes unblinking.

“Nobody can see them. It’s because they blend in with the fields.”

Despite, or possibly because of the dead serious tone in which this was delivered, Mick had been unable to prevent himself from laughing. Luckily, his ragged throat had done this for him, and the laugh came out as an unlubricated squeak, exploding halfway through into a jumping-jack-like string of coughs. Doreen had glared at Alma.

“Now look what you’ve done wi’ yer green cows!”

Surprised by their mom’s sudden conversational maneuver, Alma had for once been at a loss, unable to come up with a reply. Irrationality: Alma could dish it out all right, but couldn’t take it. Doreen had turned her attention to her youngest child, hacking and mewling there upon her knee.

“Ahh, bless ’im. ’Aya got a poorly throat, me duck? E’yar, you ’ave a pep like what the doctor said you should.”

“Pep” was the Boroughs’ term for sweet, and as Mick thought about it now it struck him that he’d never heard it used outside the district, or outside the homes of people who’d grown up there. Keeping Michael on her lap with one arm round his waist, Doreen had fumbled in her pocket for the square-shaped foil-and-paper tube she’d bought at Botterill’s, finally emerging with the pack of cherry-menthol Tunes. Deftly and with one hand, Doreen had carefully opened one end of the packet with her generous fingernails, squeezed out a single cough-drop, then proceeded to unpick the envelope-tucks of its individual wax-paper wrapping, where the tiny word “Tunes” was repeated several times in medicine-red. With a polite “ ’Scuse fingers” Doreen had held up the sticky crimson jewel to Michael’s lips, which had immediately parted like a hatchling’s beak so she could place the square-cut crystal on his tongue. He sucked it slowly, with its blunted corners poking up against his palate and his gums, especially the sore white-tipped ones at the back where teeth were starting to come through.

Doreen had sat there looking down at Michael fondly, her big face obscuring most of the blue Boroughs’ sky that had been visible between the leaning housetops. She must have been in her early thirties then, still trim and pretty with long features and dark, wavy hair. She’d lost the ghostly and unearthly silent film-star beauty that she’d had in pictures Mick had seen of her when she’d been younger, with her huge, wet, dreamy eyes, but it had been replaced by something warmer and less fragile, the appearance of somebody who’d at last grown comfortable with being who they were, somebody who no longer wore those painful clip-on button earrings. He’d gazed back at her, the cough-sweet tumbling and turning over in his mouth, losing its edges in his cherry-infused spittle, gradually transformed into a thin rose windowpane. Smiling, his mom had brushed a stray curl from the damp pink of his brow.

And then he’d coughed. He’d coughed until the air was forced out of his lungs and then had drawn a great big sucking breath in order to replace it. Somewhere in among this spluttering and confused bronchial activity, Mick had inhaled the Tune. Like a stray sink-plug dragged into the plughole of a draining basin to arrest its flow, the sweet fitted exactly in the small gap which remained in Mick’s absurdly swollen windpipe.

With horrific clarity, which made him grip the arm of the settee as he sat in the peaceful Kingsthorpe living room, Mick could remember the appalling moment when he knew his breath had stopped, a memory he had been spared until revived from his concussion earlier that day. He could recall his sudden and uncomprehending shock, his realization that something was badly wrong and his uncertainty as to what it might be. It was as if he hadn’t previously noticed he was breathing, not until he found he couldn’t do it anymore.

The terror of the moment had been overwhelming, and he’d somehow drawn away from it, as if to a remote place deep inside himself. The sounds and movements of the garden seemed far off, as did the desperate, frightened tightness in his chest. His eyes must have glazed over, staring up into his mother’s overhanging face, and he remembered how her own expression had changed instantly to one of puzzlement and then mounting anxiety. He’d known, from his dissociated vantage, that he was the cause of her concern but couldn’t for the life of him remember what he’d done that had upset her so.

“Ooh Guy, ayr mam! Come quick! Ayr Michael’s chokin’!”

The receding porthole that was Michael’s field of vision had been jiggled frantically, turned on one side and then the other, with his grandma’s taut-skinned features suddenly protruding into view, alarm suppressed beneath the glitter of her bird-like eye. Shudders of impact came from far away, hard and repetitive, like someone banging on a television set when the reception went. That must have been his gran or Doreen, thumping him upon the back as they attempted to dislodge the cough-sweet, but it hadn’t budged. He could remember the sensation of an animal with a metallic taste like pennies that had tried to climb inside his mouth, so that he’d bitten down reflexively on his mom’s fingers as she’d struggled to retrieve the blockage from his throat. There had been voices in the distance, women shouting urgently or wailing, though he hadn’t thought that this had anything to do with him.

The picture of the garden he was seeing had turned upside down at one point, which, from what he’d heard about the incident from Alma and his mom, must have been when Doreen had shook him by his ankles, hoping gravity would do the trick where all her other efforts had drawn blanks. Mick had an image of a red inverted face, an unfamiliar thing between a dog and a tomato that he’d never seen before, a kind of joke-shop devil mask he did not recognize as his distraught and weeping older sister. His short life and all its details, as they’d slid away from him, had seemed like a strange little picture-story that he’d only been half-reading anyway, with all the settings and the characters forgot even before the book was closed and put aside. The sobbing objects in the dwindling illustration, he had dimly recollected, were called people. These were something like a toy or rabbit, in that they were always doing funny things. The bricks surrounding them, piled up in flat or bulky shapes, were something he was pretty sure was known as a back-yarden in the story. Something like that, anyway, although he didn’t know what such arrangements had been used for or to do with. On the blue sheet up above were big and drifting shapes of white that you called lions. No, not lions. Cabbages, was that the word? Or generals? It didn’t matter. All these things had just been silly bits and pieces in the dream that he was waking up from. None of it was real, nor had it ever been.

He had been floating through the air, presumably borne by his mother, and was gazing up at the unfolding forms of all the lions and generals above. There’d been a gruff voice in among the ladynoise, which he assumed now had been that of Doug McGeary from next door, the yard with the big wooden gates on Andrew’s Road and the ramshackle stable at the rear. According to what Mick had been told afterwards, mostly by Alma, once the situation had been hurriedly explained to Doug, the fruit and veg purveyor had offered immediately to drive Mick to the hospital in his delivery lorry that he kept parked in the leaking stable. The unbreathing three-year-old, eyes glazed and staring, had been passed by Doreen over the back wall into the sure hands of Mrs. McGeary’s eldest son, or so the story went. Now, though, as the event came back to him, he saw that Alma must have got it wrong, at least that bit of it. His mom had merely held him up to show to Doug, not handed him across the wall. That made a lot more sense than Alma’s version, now he thought about it. Doreen had been too upset to pass her choking baby to somebody else, and what would be the point, in any case? Doug had to start his lorry up and get it out the barn, to wrangle it around the corners of their L-shaped yard, out through the splintering and distressed front gates onto St. Andrew’s Road. He wouldn’t need a half-dead toddler in the cab beside him while he took care of all that.

No, what had really happened, Mick decided as he reconstructed the occurrence, was that Doug had told Doreen to meet him out the front in half a minute, when he’d had a chance to get his vehicle into juddering and coughing action. Christ, what would his mom and gran have done if Doug McGeary hadn’t been at home? There’d been nobody else along St. Andrew’s Road or nearby in the Boroughs who had transport, motorized or horse-drawn, and as far as calling for an ambulance went, well, you could forget it. No one in the district had a phone, there was a single public call box near the old Victorian public toilets nestled at the foot of Spencer Bridge, and anyway, there wouldn’t have been time. In Mick’s own retrospective estimate, a good two minutes must have passed by that point since the last occasion that he’d drawn a breath.

He remembered floating back up the stone steps into the top half of the yard, carried along in a soft cloud of hands, of red and tear-stained faces he no longer knew, a drift of frightened voices indistinguishable from the background twitter of the rooftop birds, the breeze that strummed the television aerials, the crackling of aprons. All the world he’d had three years to get familiar with was gradually unraveling, its sounds and its sensations and its images all turning back into the flat words of the narrative that someone had been reading to him, which was coming to an end. The person in the tale that he’d liked best, the little boy, was dying in a funny little house upon a street that nobody would ever hear of. He remembered feeling slightly disappointed that the story hadn’t had a better ending, because up to then he’d been enjoying it.

A bumpy current that had fingers swirled him from the light and space and blue of the back yard into the sudden gray gloom of the kitchen and the living room. Doreen, he reasoned now, must have been holding him face-up since he recalled a moving frieze of ceiling scrolling by above him, first the flaking and uneven whiteness in the kitchen and then the expanse of beige with the stepped beading round its edge that topped the living room. His mom had carried him between the unlit summer fireplace and the dining table, heading for the passage and the front door and her rendezvous with Doug. But then something had happened. His glazed eyes had been fixed on the decorative trim around the higher reaches of the room, coming to rest within the shadow-drinking recess of an upper corner. And the corner had been … bent? Reversible, so that it stuck out where you would expect it to go in? There had been something wrong about the corner, he remembered that much, and there had been something else, what was it? Something even stranger. There’d been …

There had been a little tiny person in the corner, shouting to him a voice that came from far away, and beckoning, and telling him come up, you come up here with me, you’ll be all right. Come up. Come up. Come up.

He’d died. He’d died halfway across the living room and hadn’t made it even to the passage or the front door, let alone the cab of Doug’s delivery truck, of which he could remember nothing. He could not recall the panicked journey to the hospital … along the same route Howard had taken him today, he realized belatedly … because he hadn’t been there. He’d been dead.

He sat there on the sofa, looking like a gargoyle suffering from sunstroke, and attempted to absorb this fact, to swallow it, but like the Tune he found that it would not go down. If he’d been dead, then what were all the other memories pressing in upon him now, these images and names he half-remembered from a period that was after his demise between the fireplace and the dining table, but before he’d woken clueless and disoriented in the hospital? More to the point, if he’d been dead, how had he woken at the hospital at all? Mick felt a sort of heavy cloud descending on his heart and gut, and noted with detached surprise that in his tidy, sunlit parlor he was very, very scared.

It was at this point that Cath and the kids came home. First from the kitchen and into the living room was Jack, Mick’s oldest boy, a glowering and solidly built fifteen-year-old aspiring standup comedian who everyone had always said, in worried tones of deep foreboding, was the spit of his aunt Alma. Jack stopped in his tracks, a pace inside the door, and stared expressionlessly at his dad’s new acid facial. Looking back across his shoulder, he called to his mother and his younger brother Joe, both in the kitchen still.

“Did anybody order pizza?”

Cathy had leaned round the door to see what Jack was on about, looked blankly at her husband for an instant and then shrieked.

“Aaah! Fucking hell, what have you done?”

She rushed to Mick’s side, taking his head gingerly between her hands, turning it gently one way then another as she tried to see how bad the damage was. Their youngest son, Joe, wandered in serenely from the kitchen, taking off his zip-up jacket. Slightly built and blond and at eleven years old easily much cuter than his older brother, Joe looked quite a bit like Mick had as a child, at least according to the same authorities (including Mick’s late mother Doreen, who should know) that said Jack looked like Alma. Joe, like the young Mick, was quieter than his elder sibling, hardly difficult since Jack’s voice had not just recently broken but had melted down like a reactor and was heading for the center of the Earth. With Joe, although he didn’t broadcast on the china-rattling frequency or at the volume of his elder brother, you could tell that every bit as much was going on inside, and that most probably it would be every bit as bonkers, if less loudly advertised. Hanging his jacket on a chair, Joe gazed across the room at his dad’s altered countenance, then simply smiled and shook his head as if in fond exasperation.

“Did you get your blowtorch and your shaver muddled up again?”

While Cathy pointedly suggested that both Jack and Joe piss off upstairs if they weren’t being any help and Mick tried not to undercut the seriousness of his wife’s rebuke by laughing, he reflected that this wonderfully protective smart-assed callousness with which his kids would greet potential disaster was most probably the fault of him and Alma. Alma, mostly. He remembered when Doreen, their mom, was diagnosed with cancer of the bowel and had called her grief-stunned son and daughter into her ward cubicle to have a serious talk about how everything should be arranged. Taller than Mick in her stack heels, Alma had bent down to deliver a conspicuous stage whisper in his ear. “You hear that, Warry? This is where she’s going to tell you you’re adopted.” They’d all laughed, especially Doreen, who’d smiled at Alma and said “You don’t know. It might be you who was adopted.” Mick believed that in life there were times when the entirely inappropriate was the only appropriate response. Perhaps, though, it was only him and Alma who thought that way. Mostly Alma.

Cathy, once she’d been assured Mick’s new complexion wasn’t permanent or otherwise life-threatening, had switched her inner thermostat up from compassionate concern to moral outrage. So, why wasn’t there a label on that drum? Why hadn’t his employers even called to find out how he was since Howard brought him home from casualty? She’d fumed about it for an hour then phoned Mick’s boss, who had at least learned first-hand from the chat what it was like to have a drum of poison go off in your face. When at length it was out of Cathy’s system and she’d dropped the probably red-hot receiver back into its cradle, they’d decided to have dinner and as ordinary an evening as they could manage. As a plan this worked quite well, despite the fact that Mick’s deformity gave things the feeling of an Elephant Man family video reel.

Dinner was tasty and appreciated and passed by without event. During the main course, Cathy turned reproachfully to Jack and scolded him about his eating habits.

“Jack, I do wish that you’d eat your vegetables.”

Her eldest son gave her a look of condescending sympathy.

“Mom, I wish women would fall at my feet, but we both know it isn’t going to happen. Let’s just face it and move on.”

Halfway through pudding, little Joe – if only they’d have named his elder brother “Hoss”, Mick suddenly thought, ruefully – had broken from his customary introverted silence to announce that he’d decided what he’d like to be when he did Work Experience next year: “A fridge.” Mick, Cath and Jack had all looked at each other worriedly, then gone on eating their desserts. It was a fairly normal dinnertime, as those things went.

After they’d done the washing up, Jack said he had the second series of Paul Abbott’s Shameless which was out on DVD, and asked if they could watch it. Since there wasn’t much of interest showing on terrestrial or Sky, Mick had agreed. Besides, he didn’t get to view a lot of television, what with getting up so early in the mornings, and although he’d heard Alma and Jack discussing the new sink-estate-set comedy, he hadn’t seen it yet. He’d got the rest of the week off from work, most probably as a result of Cathy’s phone call, and so could afford to sit back with a beer and take it in. If nothing else, it would be a distraction from the frightening train of thought his family had interrupted by arriving home. Although the sitcom’s sense of humor was notoriously grim, he doubted it was grimmer than a memory of dying in the Boroughs at the age of three.

It was the second season’s final episode they watched, Jack having seen the others previously. Though Cathy shook her head and tutted, wandering off to get on with some chores around the house, Mick thought the show was pretty good. From what he’d overheard of Jack and Alma’s fierce debate about its merits, Alma hadn’t liked it, or had liked it only grudgingly, but then Mick’s sister would find fault with almost anything that wasn’t her own work, as if on principle. “Like Bread with STDs”, that had been one of her off-hand dismissals. If Mick understood the gist of Alma’s doubts about the program, what she didn’t like was the portrayal of the working class as having inexhaustible reserves of strength and humor in adversity, with which they could laugh off the gruesome deprivations of their genuinely dreadful situation. “Families like that,” she’d say regarding the show’s central clan, the Gallaghers, “in real life the old man wouldn’t be such an ultimately lovable disgusting drunk, and every train-wreck that he dragged his family through with him wouldn’t end up in a heart-warming group cackle. That thirteen-year-old girl with the supernatural coping skills would have been shagged by half the married blokes on the estate for alcopops. The thing is, people watch a show like that … and it’s well made, well written, funny and well acted, I’m not arguing with that … and in a funny way it reassures them about something that they shouldn’t feel so reassured about. It’s not okay that people have to live like that. It’s not okay that terms like sink estate are even in the language. And this plucky, mirthful underclass resilience, it’s a myth. It’s one the underclass themselves are eager to believe so they don’t have to feel so bad about their situation, and it’s also one the middle class are eager to believe, for the exact same reason.” As Mick now recalled, on that occasion Alma’s diatribe (which had been vented, it must be remembered, at her fifteen-year-old nephew) had been terminated when Jack ventured his own counter-argument: “Jesus, Aunt Warry, lighten up. They’re only puppets.”

Mick was more or less on Jack’s side there. At least in Shameless there was a more honest picture of existence in the lower margins than in shows like Bread, with or without the STDs. And how could Alma honestly expect a situation comedy to reproduce her own bleak and consistently enraged view of society? It would be like an episode of Are You Being Served? by Dostoevsky. “Mr. Humphries, are you free?” “None of us are truly free, dear Mrs. Slocum, unless it is in the act of murder.”

No, the only problem with the show for Mick was that the longer it went on, the more he was reminded of the strange anxieties that he was watching television in an effort to forget. That little figure he’d remembered, calling from its upper corner of the living room at 17, St. Andrew’s Road, what could that mean except that he had died, been taken up into some kind of afterlife by some, Mick didn’t know, some sort of angel?

Well, it could mean he was going round the corner. Going barmy. There was always that to be considered in the Vernall clan and offshoots, like the Warrens. Hadn’t his dad’s grandfather gone mad, and his dad’s cousin, Audrey? It was in the family, everybody said, and looked at logically was a more likely cause for Mick’s peculiar memories and feelings than that he’d been lifted up to Heaven by an angel. Anyway, the more he thought about it, then the less the tiny person that had been perched in the corner seemed like any sort of angel that he’d ever heard of. It had been too small, too plainly dressed, in its pink cardigan, its navy skirt and ankle-socks. A girl. Mick could remember now that the homunculus he’d seen had been a little girl with blond hair in a fringe. She hadn’t looked much more than ten, and definitely hadn’t looked much like an angel. She’d had no wings and no halo, though there had been something odd, what was it, draped around her neck like a long scarf? A fur scarf, that was it. All drenched in blood. With little heads grown out of it. Oh, fuck.

He didn’t want to be insane, he didn’t want his wife and kids and friends to have to see him in that state, to feel bad when they left it longer each time between visits to whatever institution he’d end up in. Madness was all very well if you were Alma and in a profession where insanity was a desirable accessory, a kind of psycho-bling. You couldn’t get away with it down Martin’s Yard, though. In the reconditioning business there was no real concept of delightful eccentricity. You’d find yourself as the recipient of a pharmaceutical lobotomy provided on the National Health, as a result of which your waistband would expand as your abilities to think, talk and respond to stimuli contracted. This was not an idea that Mick found agreeable, or even bearable, but at that moment it appeared to be a serious possibility. Mick could feel thousands of unlikely details as upsetting and impossible as the girl’s blood-soaked fur scarf, bulging from underneath the floorboards of his memory, waiting to burst up from below and overwhelm his happy, ordinary life. Ideas like that just wouldn’t fit in Mick’s existence. They would bend it out of shape, destroy it. With renewed determination, Mick fixed his attention on the episode of Shameless he was watching. Anything in order to avoid the stubbornly persistent vision of that little girl, dressed in her furry necklace made of death.

The hour-long show was almost over, with the Gallaghers all massed in a communal living-room and trying to get the two twin babies they’d been left in charge of off to sleep. The babies’ mother, an emotionally-overwrought Seroxat casualty, had left instructions that the twins could be lulled into nodding off by singing hymns to them, their favorite being Blake and Parry’s almost universally admired “Jerusalem”. The family are croaking their way through another repetition of the much-loved standard, with no obvious effect upon the howling babies, when the mother of the twins at last gets home. Despite her welders’ goggles and her OCD, she then proceeds to send the twins to sleep with a surprisingly ethereal rendition of “Jerusalem” delivered in an unexpectedly well-trained and beautiful soprano. “And did those feet, in ancient time …”

The tears welled up from nowhere in Mick’s eyes, so that he had to blink them back before the kids could see. He’d no idea where this was coming from. It was just something in that melody, the simple way its notes marched up and down, that broke his heart. Worse, there was something in the way the hymn was being used here in this episode of Shameless, like a ray of light among the busted sofas and the Tourette’s and the tea-cup rings, its purity and confidence more bright and blinding for the hopelessness of its surroundings. This fierce, blazing sanctity amid the squalor was what did for Mick. It had a feel about it that chimed perfectly with all of the disturbing memories from his childhood he was at that moment trying to suppress, a sense of crystal vision thrusting up between satanic mills that fitted like a key in all of Mick’s internal locks. The cellar door of his unconscious was thrown open from beneath and a great flood of bubbling unearthliness surged up, much more than he’d imagined could be down there, filling him with images and words and voices, with the language of an alien experience.

Destructor, Bedlam Jennies, length and breadth and whenth and linger, Porthimoth’ di Norhan’, crook doors and a Jacob Flight. “It’s an old can of beans, but every bubble that you ever blew is still inside.” Mansoul, the strangles and the Dead Dead Gang. Destructor. Trilliards is the proper name for Builders’ Marbles. Pay attention to the chimneys and the middle corners. Some call it the five-and-twenty thousand nights. Ghost-seam. Destructor. Spacemen means it isn’t ripe. A saint up in the twenty-fives where all the water level’s rising. Angles from the realms of Glory. “You all fold up into us, and we all fold up into him.” A balance hangs above a winding road. Soul of the Hole, you see it in their furious eyes. The bare girls dancing on the tannin barrels, what a day that is. “We can go scrumping in the madhouse,” and Destructor and Destructor and Destructor. Everywhere and everyone he loved, sucked in and gone. The rood is broke, that’s why the center cannot hold. He rapes her in the car park where Bath Gardens used to be and we run off to find the ghosts that we’ve annoyed. Woodwork and painted stars upon the landings, Puck’s Hats sprouting from the cracks …

Mick rose abruptly and excused himself, pretending that he needed to go to the bathroom. Joe asked if he wanted them to pause the DVD, but he said that they needn’t bother, calling back to them from halfway up the stairs. Locking the bathroom door he sat there on the toilet with its lid down for a good five minutes until he’d stopped shuddering. It was no good. He couldn’t keep this to himself. He’d have to tell someone.

He stood and lifted up the toilet seat, taking a token piss before he went back down again, and out of habit washed his hands in the small basin nearby when he’d done. He glanced up at the mirror on the bathroom cabinet and started at the raw and peeling face confronting him, having by then forgotten all about his accident at work. His features looked so much like unconvincing make-up from a horror film, that what with all the supernatural visitations crowding in his head right then, Mick had to laugh. The laughter sounded wrong, though, so he packed it in and went downstairs to join his family.

Somehow he managed to last out the evening, acting normal, without giving anything away, though Jack and Cathy both remarked that he was more than usually quiet. It wasn’t until he and Cathy were in bed that it came spilling out, disjointed and so mangled in the telling that it made no sense, even to Mick himself. Cath listened calmly while he told her he was scared that he was going mad, then sensibly suggested he phone up his older sister and arrange to go out for a drink with her, so that he could ask Alma what she thought about it all. In any practical concern that was related to the real world Cathy wouldn’t trust her sister-in-law’s judgment for a second, but with matters of the twilight zone like those afflicting Mick there was no one she trusted more than Alma. Set a thief to catch a thief. Fight fire with fire. Send for a nightmare to arrest a nightmare.

Mick did just as Cathy said. He might be mad, he wasn’t stupid. He arranged to meet his sister at the Golden Lion in Castle Street that coming Saturday, though he’d no clear idea as to why he’d suggested this specific venue, a decaying and unprepossessing hostelry smack in the Boroughs’ devastated heart. It just seemed like the right place, that was all, the right dilapidated wonder of a place to tell his older sister his dilapidated wonder of a tale, about the little boy who’d choked to death, to actual death, when he was only three.

About the girl in her pink cardigan and stinking, gory neckerchief who’d reached down from the corner with her hot and sticky hands and said “Come up. Come up.”

And taken him upstairs.